picnic, and you never gave it back."

"Oh--oh!" answered McTeague, in distress. "That's so, that's so. I--you
ought to have told me before. Here's your money, and I'm obliged to
you."

"It ain't much," observed Marcus, sullenly. "But I need all I can get
now-a-days."

"Are you--are you broke?" inquired McTeague.

"And I ain't saying anything about your sleeping at the hospital that
night, either," muttered Marcus, as he pocketed the coin.

"Well--well--do you mean--should I have paid for that?"

"Well, you'd 'a' had to sleep SOMEWHERES, wouldn't you?" flashed out
Marcus. "You 'a' had to pay half a dollar for a bed at the flat."

"All right, all right," cried the dentist, hastily, feeling in his
pockets. "I don't want you should be out anything on my account, old
man. Here, will four bits do?"

"I don't WANT your damn money," shouted Marcus in a sudden rage,
throwing back the coin. "I ain't no beggar."

McTeague was miserable. How had he offended his pal?

"Well, I want you should take it, Mark," he said, pushing it towards
him.

"I tell you I won't touch your money," exclaimed the other through his
clenched teeth, white with passion. "I've been played for a sucker long
enough."

"What's the matter with you lately, Mark?" remonstrated McTeague.
"You've got a grouch about something. Is there anything I've done?"

"Well, that's all right, that's all right," returned Marcus as he rose
from the table. "That's all right. I've been played for a sucker long
enough, that's all. I've been played for a sucker long enough." He went
away with a parting malevolent glance.

At the corner of Polk Street, between the flat and the car conductors'
coffee-joint, was Frenna's. It was a corner grocery; advertisements for
cheap butter and eggs, painted in green marking-ink upon wrapping paper,
stood about on the sidewalk outside. The doorway was decorated with a
huge Milwaukee beer sign. Back of the store proper was a bar where white
sand covered the floor. A few tables and chairs were scattered here
and there. The walls were hung with gorgeously-colored tobacco
advertisements and colored lithographs of trotting horses. On the wall
behind the bar was a model of a full-rigged ship enclosed in a bottle.

It was at this place that the dentist used to leave his pitcher to
be filled on Sunday afternoons. Since his engagement to Trina he had
discontinued this habit. However, he still dropped into Frenna's one or
two nights in the