ve even the most abandoned of
mankind a sporting chance.

"Hello, Al!"

"I see you, Skippy."

The tone was not encouraging. Bedelle determined on direct methods. He
turned his pockets deliberately inside out.

"You see?"

"Oh yes, I see you."

"Anything doin'?"

"Nothing doin'," said Al, stroking his corn-colored mustache with that
languid finality against which there was no appeal. "Nothin' at all."

"He has had his chance," said Bedelle to himself in gloomy pride. Yes,
Al had had his chance, that one chance that comes unwittingly to every
man--Al who might have toured the world with him as his majordomo, or
his confidential valet.

"Hello, Dennis!" he said, perceiving back of an enormous chocolate
eclair the human anaconda famine and opportunity had at this moment made
of Finnegan, the discoverer of the double adjective.

"Hello yourself!"

"How's the bank account?" said Skippy lightly, for etiquette forbade any
reference to the half-dollar parted with on the Wednesday before.

"Why, bless my immortal soul, you old rambunctious, skipping
Zockarooster, are you setting them up?" said Brian de Boru, pretending
to misunderstand.

Skippy disdained a reply. Al, after all, was but running true to form,
but this was the basest ingratitude,--the serpent's tooth in the fair
landscape of friendship.

"If he'd at least offered to share that eclair I--I could--" said Skippy
to himself, and then stopped in silence before the future Finnegan had
thrown to the winds. For he liked Dennis and Dennis _would_ have made
such an ideal publicity man.

He passed like a poor relation at a wedding feast, and as he passed with
many a stammered hint, and eloquently pleading eyes, his faith in his
kind began to ooze away. Of course it was the end of the month, yet of
twenty friends who had fed from his hand, when his hand had been
hospitable, not one stirred to the commonest of human impulses. And so
gloomy, alone and misunderstood, like the young Napoleon at Brienne,
John C. Bedelle, with the consciousness of future greatness, moved out
from the uncomprehending crowd. At the door Toots Cortrelle arrived with
unmistakably jingling pockets, and seeing him, cried with the zest of
young hunger certain of gratification:

"Hullo, Skippy, old sockbutts!"

"Couldn't lend me a quarter or a dime, could you?" said Skippy solemnly.

"Why not?"

"You can, Toots--you can, honest?"

"With ease and pleasure. This is the way it is don