snapped trousers
about legs like broom-handles. Black pads were hugged to his ears
by a steel strip that curved behind his head, and he wore a hard hat
that seemed merely to perch insecurely on his caput instead of fit.
Constable Nute, getting a glimpse of him through the store-window,
remarked that with five minutes and a razor-strop he could put a
shaving edge on the stranger's visage, but added promptly when he
saw him disappear into the town office that some one could probably
get a job within the next five minutes honing the nicks out of that
edge.

Cap'n Sproul was just then absorbed in a task that he hated even worse
than literary composition. He was adding figures. They were the items
for road bills, and there were at least two yards of them on sheets
of paper pasted together, for nearly every voter in town was
represented. The Cap'n was half-way up one of the columns, and was
exercising all his mental grip to hold on to the slowly increasing
total on which he was laboriously piling units.

"I am always glad to meet a man who loves figgers," remarked the
stranger, solemnly. He set his valise on the table and leaned over
the Cap'n's shoulder. "I have wonderful faculty for figgers. Give
me a number and I'll tell you the cube of it instantly, in the snap
of a finger."

Cap'n Sproul merely ground his teeth and shoved his nose closer to
the paper. He did not dare to look up. His whole soul was centred
in effort to "walk the crack" of that column.

"I could do it when I was fifteen--and that was fifty years ago,"
went on the thin man.

The enunciation of those figures nearly put the Cap'n out of
commission, but with a gulp and after a mental stagger he marched
on.

"Now give me figgers--tens or hundreds," pleaded the stranger. "I'll
give you the cube in one second--the snap of a finger. Since I see
you hesitate, we'll take sixteen--a very simple factor. Cube it!"
He clacked a bony finger into an osseous palm and cried: "Four
thousand and ninety-six!"

That did it!

"Ninety-six," repeated the Cap'n, dizzily; realizing that he had
bounced off the track, he rose, kicked his chair out from under him
and shoved a livid and infuriated visage into the thin man's face.

"Whang-jacket your gor-righteously imperdence!" he bellowed, "what
do you mean by stickin' that fish-hawk beak of your'n into my business
and make me lose count? Get to Tophet out of here!"

The stranger calmly removed his ear-pads and gazed on