d been
bottled in bond.

He carried it to the fire and with the sleeve of his mackinaw removed
the accumulated dust from the label. "Old Morden Rye," he read aloud,
holding it close to the firelight. And as he read his thoughts flew
backward to past delights. Here was an old friend come to cheer him in
the wilderness.

He was no longer cold nor hungry, and before his eyes danced the
bright, white lights of the man-made night of Broadway. His shoulders
straightened and the sparkle came into his eyes. Forgotten was his
determination to make good, and the future was a remote thing of no
present moment nor concern. Once again he was Broadway Bill, the sport!

Carefully and deliberately he broke the seal and removed the
cork-rimmed glass stopper, which he flung to a far corner of the
room--for that was Bill's way--to throw away the cork. There was
nothing small in his make-up; and for why is whisky, but to drink while
it lasts? And one cannot drink through a cork-rimmed stopper. So he
threw it away.

Only that day as he had laboriously stepped off the long miles he had
thought with virtuous complacence of the completeness of his
reformation.

He thought how he had refused to drink with Daddy Dunnigan from the
smeared and cloudy glass half-filled with the raw, rank liquor, across
the surface of which had trailed the tobacco-stained mustaches of the
half-dozen unkempt men.

A week before he had refused to drink good whisky with Appleton--but
that was amid surroundings against which he had fortified himself;
surroundings made familiar by a little veneered table in the corner of
the tile-floored bar of a well-known hotel, and while the spirit of his
determination to quit was strong upon him. Besides, it was good policy.

Therefore, he ordered ginger ale; but Appleton drank whisky and noted
that the other eyed the liquor as the little beads rose to the top, and
that as he looked he unconsciously moistened his lips with his
tongue--just that little thing--as he looked at the whisky in
Appleton's glass. By that swift movement Appleton understood, for he
knew men--it was his business to know men--and then and there he
decided to send Bill to Moncrossen's camp, where it was whispered
whisky flowed freely.

Appleton had no son, and he felt strangely drawn toward the young man
whose eyes had held him from the time of their first meeting. But he
must prove his worth, and the test should be hard--and very thorough.

Appleton