er shabby clothes, looked like
a gentleman, wore an expression Jones's junior assistant had seen many
a time before. He had seen it frequently on the countenances of other
junior assistants who had tramped the streets and met more or less
savage rebuffs through a day's length, without disposing of a single
Delkoff, and thereby adding five dollars to the ten per. It was the kind
of thing which wiped the youth out of a man's face and gave him a
hard, worn look about the eyes. He had looked like that himself many an
unfeeling day before he had learned to "know the ropes and not mind a
bit of hot air." His buoyant, slangy soul was a friendly thing. He was a
gregarious creature, and liked his fellow man. He felt, indeed, more at
ease with him when he needed "jollying along." Reticence was not even
etiquette in a case as usual as this.

"Say," he broke out, "perhaps I oughtn't to have worried you. Are you up
against it? Down on your luck, I mean," in hasty translation.

Mount Dunstan grinned a little.

"That's a very good way of putting it," he answered. "I never heard 'up
against it' before. It's good. Yes, I'm up against it.

"Out of a job?" with genial sympathy.

"Well, the job I had was too big for me. It needed capital." He grinned
slightly again, recalling a phrase of his Western past. "I'm afraid I'm
down and out."

"No, you're not," with cheerful scorn. "You're not dead, are you? S'long
as a man's not been dead a month, there's always a chance that there's
luck round the corner. How did you happen here? Are you piking it?"

Momentarily Mount Dunstan was baffled. G. Selden, recognising the fact,
enlightened him. "That's New York again," he said, with a boyish touch
of apology. "It means on the tramp. Travelling along the turnpike. You
don't look as if you had come to that--though it's queer the sort of
fellows you do meet piking sometimes. Theatrical companies that have
gone to pieces on the road, you know. Perhaps--" with a sudden thought,
"you're an actor. Are you?"

Mount Dunstan admitted to himself that he liked the junior assistant of
Jones immensely. A more ingenuously common young man, a more innocent
outsider, it had never been his blessed privilege to enter into close
converse with, but his very commonness was a healthy, normal thing.
It made no effort to wreathe itself with chaplets of elegance; it
was beautifully unaware that such adornment was necessary. It enjoyed
itself, youthfully; attacked the