upper. Marge Shannon made chili that I just couldn't stay
away from. Thick with beans and meat and easy on the spices so it
wouldn't burn an old man's stomach.

[Illustration]

Joe and I had just gone into the living room--Marge stayed in the
kitchen to do the dishes--and I was feeling stuffed and kinda sleepy.
All of a sudden Joe says out of a clear blue sky: "Harry, this is a
hell of a world we live in, isn't it?"

Now Joe had never struck me as being the unhappy type. He loved his
work, he loved his wife (and just about in that order), and so far as
I knew he didn't owe any money. So I tried to feel him out, to find
out where the rub was.

"There's nothing wrong with the world, Joe," I says. "It's just the
people in it."

He started methodically filling his pipe and tamping down the tobacco
and not saying a word and I get the feeling that he's deadly serious
about something.

"You're right," he says quietly. "It isn't the world, it's the
people."

I sit there feeling puzzled but a lot less sleepy and finally I ask:
"Anything wrong, Joe?"

He lights his pipe and settles back in the big, overstuffed easy chair
with the flowered slip-cover that Marge made, still frowning. "It's an
unhappy world," he repeats.

"It all depends on what side of the picture you want to look at," I
says, trying to cheer him up. "Maybe you been reading too many
newspaper headlines."

Joe wasn't listening. "What makes people unhappy, Harry?"

Now, son, there's a million things that make people unhappy. Given
half the night, I could maybe list a couple of hundred. But to narrow
it down to one or two, I couldn't do it. So I just shook my head and
let Joe carry the ball.

"It's a complex world, Harry. A lot of people never adjust to it. Some
of them turn the tables and try to adjust the world to them, which
makes a lot of other people unhappy. No, I'd say there's a certain
number of people who just don't fit in this world of ours. Maybe at a
different time and on another world, they might fit. But they don't
fit on this one, not right here and now."

* * * * *

That was a way of looking at it that I had never thought of before.
And Joe had a point. Now you take old Barney Muhlenberg, the town
drunk. I knew Barney when he was a boy, and a more sober,
adventure-seeking young rascal you never saw. But by then all the
frontiers had dried up, it was between wars, and the only adventure
Barney could fi