grotesque figure
with his red-brown hair tumbled over his white, nervous countenance of
the pointed chin, with his hooked nose, and his twinkling chipmunk eyes.

"He'll hit the first saloon, if you don't watch out," Bob managed to
whisper to Tally.

But the latter shook his head. From long experience he knew the type.

His reasoning was correct. Roaring Dick tramped doggedly down the length
of the street to the little frame depot. There he slumped into one of
the hard seats in the waiting-room, where he promptly slept. Tally sat
down beside him and withdrew into himself. The twilight fell. After an
apparently interminable interval a train rumbled in. Tally shook his
companion. The latter awakened just long enough to stumble aboard the
smoking car, where, his knees propped up, his chin on his breast, he
relapsed into deep slumber.

They arrived at the boarding house late in the evening. Mrs. Hallowell
set out a cold supper, to which Bob was ready to do full justice. Ten
minutes later he found himself in a tiny box of a bedroom, furnished
barely. He pushed open the window and propped it up with a piece of
kindling. The earth had fallen into a very narrow silhouette, and the
star-filled heavens usurped all space, crowding the world down. Against
the sky the outlines stood significant in what they suggested and
concealed--slumbering roof-tops, the satiated mill glowing vaguely
somewhere from her banked fires, the blackness and mass of silent lumber
yards, the mysterious, hushing fingers of the ships' masts, and then low
and vague, like a narrow strip of velvet dividing these men's affairs
from the star-strewn infinite, the wilderness. As Bob leaned from the
window the bigness of these things rushed into his office-starved spirit
as air into a vacuum. The cold of the lake breeze entered his lungs. He
drew a deep breath of it. For the first time in his short business
experience he looked forward eagerly to the morrow.

VIII

Bob was awakened before daylight by the unholy shriek of a great
whistle. He then realized that for some time he had been vaguely aware
of kindling and stove sounds. The bare little room had become bitterly
cold. A gray-blackness represented the world outside. He lighted his
glass lamp and took a hasty, shivering sponge bath in the crockery
basin. Then he felt better in the answering glow of his healthy,
straight young body; and a few moments later was prepared to enjoy a
fragrant, new-lit,