ratively
speaking, before his longing look. But it stayed, a bright pat, as
yellow as his own hair, on a doll's dish of a plate. And as Johnnie had
not tasted butter for a very long time, he proceeded now, after the
manner of the male, to clear that cunning little dish by eating the
choicest thing first.

As for the one-eyed man, his knife, held in his left hand, was going up
and down between the dish of beans and his mouth with mechanical
regularity. At the bean dish, he covered the long blade with a ruddy
heap. Then balancing it all nicely, he swung it ceiling-ward, met it
half-way by a quick duck of the mouse-covered head, and swept it clean
with a dextrous, all-enveloping movement.

Johnnie was hungry too. The butter gone, along with its complement of
bread, he attacked his share of the meat and vegetables, using, however
(which was to Cis's credit), a fork. The dish was delicious. He forgot
even the placard.

So far the one-eyed man had proven to be anything but a talkative
person. Under the circumstances this was just as well. Johnnie could not
have shared just then in a conservation. Twice during the meal he
reached down and let out the strap a hole or two. And for the first time
in his life he was grateful for the roominess of Barber's old clothes.

Half an hour, and Johnnie was, as he himself expressed it, "stuffed like
a sausage." The orange, he dropped into his shirt-band to find a place
with the books, there being no space for it internally.

"Full up, eh?" demanded the one-eyed man, mopping at his mustache so
hard with a paper napkin that Johnnie expected to see the hairy growth
come away from its moorings under the leathery nose.

"It was a feast!" pronounced Johnnie, borrowing from the language of his
friend Aladdin. A moment later he gasped as he saw his host carelessly
ring a fifty-cent piece upon the gorgeous marble of the table top. Then
the meal had cost so much as that! As he trotted doorward in the wake of
the spurred heels, his boy's conscience faintly smote him. He almost
felt that he had eaten too much.

"My goodness!" he murmured, his glance missing the variegated mosaic of
the floor.

But still another moment, and the one-eyed man had halted at a desk
which stood close to the front door, and was throwing down a one-dollar
bill, together with some silver.

Johnnie knew something was wrong. His host was forgetful, absent-minded.
He realized that he must interfere. "You jus' paid the l