Ha! Ha! The
life here is very different.'

"There; that must of been what he tried to say at the beginning--'The
life here is very different.' I should think he'd find it so, seeing the
only danger that boy was ever in here was the sleeping sickness."

Hereupon the lady removed the wrapper from a trade journal and scanned
certain market quotations. They pleased her little. She said it was
darned queer that the war should send every price in the world up but the
price of beef, beef quotations being just where the war had found them.
Not that she wanted to rob any one! Still and all, why give everyone a
chance but cattle raisers? She muttered hugely of this discrimination
and a moment later seemed to be knitting her remarks into a gray sock.
The mutterings had gradually achieved the coherence of remarks. And I
presently became aware that the uninflated price of beef was no longer
their burden.

They now concerned the singular reticence of all losers of fist fights.
Take Squat's German. Squat would be telling for the rest of his life how
he put that Wisconsin alien out with one punch. But if I guessed the
German would be telling it as often as Squat told it I was plumb foolish.
He wouldn't tell it at all. Losers never do. Any one might think that
parties getting licked lost their powers of speech. Not so with the
winners of fights; not so at all!

At this very minute, while we sat there in that room at a quarter past
eight, all over the wide world modest-seeming men were telling how they
had licked the other man with one punch, or two or three at the most. It
was being told in Kulanche County, Washington, and in Patagonia and
Philadelphia and Africa and China, and them places; in clubs and lumber
camps and Pullman cars and ships and saloons--in states that remained
free of the hydrant-headed monster, Prohibition--in tents and palaces; in
burning deserts and icy wastes. At that very second, in an ice hut up by
the North Pole, a modest Eskimo was telling and showing his admiring wife
and relatives just how he had put out another Eskimo that had come round
and tried to start something. Which was another mystery, the man winning
the fight being always put upon and invariably in the right. In every one
of these world-wide encounters justice always prevailed and only the
winner talked about it afterward.

"And lots of times," continued the lady, "this talkative winner has been
set upon by as many as three others. But he li