running
down the lane with his bunch of stolen bananas. I recalled that absurd
scene on the waters; I heard him say: 'No, seh; Ah cain't affawd to take
chances; Ah cain't affawd it.'

"Of course he couldn't afford it. Think--a wife and seven children!

"That night I went through his papers, putting things in order, and from
every leaf, every scrap, came corroboration of the new fact. He was one
of those pitiful pedagogues of the rural South, shiftless,
half-educated, inefficient. He had never been able to earn much, and
his family had always gently starved. Then had come the chance--the
golden chance--the Philippines and a thousand a year. He had taken the
bait, had come ten thousand miles to the spot of his maximum value.
Only, things had not gone quite right. Thanks to the beautiful red-tape
of the department, three months had gone before he had received his
first month's pay. Then it had come in Mex., and when he had succeeded
in changing it into gold it had dwindled to sixty dollars. Of course, he
had sent it all back, for even then it would take it six more weeks to
reach its destination, and sixty dollars is hardly too much to tide over
five months for a family of eight. These five months had to be caught up
in some way, so every month his salary, depreciated ten per cent by the
change, had gone across the waters. He wore _camisas_ and no shoes, he
stole bananas. And his value, shoeless, _camisa_-clothed, was sixty
dollars a month. He was just so much capital. He had to be careful of
that capital.

"'Ah cain't affawd to take chances; Ah cain't affawd it.' Of course he
couldn't.

"And so he had fought on blindly, stubbornly, and, at last, with that
pitiful faculty we have, all of us, of defeating our own plans, he had
killed himself, he had killed the capital, the golden goose.

"Yes, I found confirmation, but, after all, I did not need it. I had
learned it all; understanding had come to me, swift, sharp, vital as a
pang, when in the roaring light of the torch I had looked upon the pale
little tintypes, the tintypes of Lee and Amy and Jackson and
Geraldine."

THE LEAGUE OF THE OLD MEN

BY

JACK LONDON

_Copyright_, 1902, by the Macmillan Company Reprinted from CHILDREN OF
THE FROST by permission

AT THE Barracks a man was being tried for his life. He was an old man, a
native from the Whitefish River, which empties into the Yukon below Lake
Le Barge. All Dawson was wrought up over the affair, a