upport or as if avoiding
contact with their surroundings; they crouched in the shelter of the
gilded dance-halls, seeking a sort of protection in one another's
disreputable company. From some of the windows haggard faces smiled at
Daniels, and he heard sounds of a merrymaking that were particularly
offensive at this hour. Until this moment he had regarded Arcadia with
fatherly pride, and had not dreamed it was wicked, hence this discovery
enraged him. He was not a sensitive man, having trod the frontier where
vice is naked, but something about the rotten core of this new community
sickened him. It reminded him of a child diseased.

And then, as if to point the comparison, he saw a child, a tiny, fat,
round-faced person leading a puppy by a string.

Now, women were strange to John Daniels, since there had been but one in
his life, and he had possessed her only briefly, but children were
mysterious, incomprehensible creatures; phenomena which excited at once
his awe and his amazement. They made him ill at ease; he had never
touched one, with the possible exception of an Indian papoose, now and
then, therefore his present meeting constituted an experience--almost an
adventure. It was a white child, too, and it gazed at him with the
disconcerting calmness of a full-grown person. Daniels was both
embarrassed and shocked at its presence in this locality. He hesitated,
then summoned his courage and said, timidly:

"Say, kid, ain't you lost?"

The child continued to stare at him in unaffected wonder, leaving him
painfully conscious of his absurd size and forbidding appearance. He
feared that once it had overcome its first amazement it would begin to
cry and thus cover him with ignominy. But, happily for him, the puppy
experienced none of its owner's doubts and uncertainties; it flattened
its round stomach, thumped its soft paws upon the sidewalk, then
approached the giant in a delirious series of wobbly leaps, wiggling an
eloquent, if awkward, declaration of friendship.

"Fine dog-team you're driving, sonny!" Daniels smiled, congratulating
himself upon an admirable display of wit, only to realize with a start
that he had made a mistake. Some sixth sense informed him that this was
not a boy. It was a humiliating error.

"Say, missie, you--you don't belong here. You're plumb off your trail.
That's a cinch!" He cast a worried glance over his shoulder and saw a
hideous blanched face smile at him between a pair of red curtains