"I've thought the whole thing over carefully
and I've decided that I can't lend you that money. I'd like to oblige
you, but I don't feel I ought to--it'd put a crimp in me for a month."

Gordon, watching him dully, wondered why he had never before noticed
how much those upper teeth projected.

"I'm--mighty sorry, Gordon," continued Dean, "but that's the way it
is."

He took out his wallet and deliberately counted out seventy-five
dollars in bills.

"Here," he said, holding them out, "here's seventy-five; that makes
eighty all together. That's all the actual cash I have with me,
besides what I'll actually spend on the trip."

Gordon raised his clenched hand automatically, opened it as though it
were a tongs he was holding, and clenched it again on the money.

"I'll see you at the dance," continued Dean. "I've got to get along to
the barber shop."

"So-long," said Gordon in a strained and husky voice.

"So-long."

Dean, began to smile, but seemed to change his mind. He nodded briskly
and disappeared.

But Gordon stood there, his handsome face awry with distress, the roll
of bills clenched tightly in his hand. Then, blinded by sudden tears,
he stumbled clumsily down the Biltmore steps.

III

About nine o'clock of the same night two human beings came out of a
cheap restaurant in Sixth Avenue. They were ugly, ill-nourished,
devoid of all except the very lowest form of intelligence, and without
even that animal exuberance that in itself brings color into life;
they were lately vermin-ridden, cold, and hungry in a dirty town of a
strange land; they were poor, friendless; tossed as driftwood from
their births, they would be tossed as driftwood to their deaths. They
were dressed in the uniform of the United States Army, and on the
shoulder of each was the insignia of a drafted division from New
Jersey, landed three days before.

The taller of the two was named Carrol Key, a name hinting that in his
veins, however thinly diluted by generations of degeneration, ran
blood of some potentiality. But one could stare endlessly at the long,
chinless face, the dull, watery eyes, and high cheek-bones, without
finding suggestion of either ancestral worth or native resourcefulness.

His companion was swart and bandy-legged, with rat-eyes and a
much-broken hooked nose. His defiant air was obviously a pretense, a
weapon of protection borrowed from that world of snarl and snap, of
physical bluff and physical menace, in wh