gambling and the selling of "bootleg" booze....

These farmers were a wild lot ... something like European peasants in
their smacking of the soil and the country to which they belonged, but
with a verve and dash of their own distinctly American.

There were three or four cheap restaurants that catered solely to their
trade ... "a square meal for a quarter" ... and a square meal they
served ... multitudes of fried stuff ... beefsteak, potatoes, boiled
ham, cabbage, heaps of white bread constantly replenished as it was
voraciously devoured ... always plenty of hot, steaming coffee. Where
these restaurants profited I could never see ... unless by a little
bootlegging on the side.

It was to one of them that I repaired when I left my malodorous job. The
same one where I had spent my first night in town.

* * * * *

Langworth sent for me one day.

"I have heard wild tales about you, Johnnie. I don't usually listen to
gossip, but these tales are so recurrent and persistent ... about your
going about with the degraded people who live in the Bottoms, that I
considered I ought to see you about it."

I confessed that, though I did not drink their bootleg booze, I did have
a wide acquaintanceship with the folk of the Bottoms, and that I knew
all the rowdies among the farmers ... that I passed a lot of time about
the livery stables talking with them. That I often rode out to their
farms in the hills and spent Saturdays and Sundays there. I avowed that
there people were more interesting to me than the carefully tailored
professors and students.

My schoolmates had met me on the streets in company with these
wild-looking yokels, sometimes taking them to their waggons when they
were too drunk to pilot themselves effectively. And they had applied to
me the proverb of "birds of a feather."

* * * * *

Before I left, Langworth drew from me the admission that I was away
behind in my board bill at the Farmers' Restaurant. My hopes of making
immediate money as a writer of poems for the magazines had so far been
barren of fruit.

"Sh! sit down a minute and wait." His wife was coming downstairs,
querulously, waveringly; her eyes red from weeping.

"Laddie has just died."

"The shepherd dog?" I enquired; for she had spoken as of a human demise.

"Yes, the dog ... but he was human, if anyone was." There was an
acidulous resentment in the tone of her answer that indi