sh of peas.

She glided away once more and did not again come near his table while
he ate. He kept his eyes on her throughout the meal, and continued to
lower them when he thought her about to look toward him. His "ribber"
was good, and he ate the last scrap. Then he paid his bill and hurried
out.

Through the window he looked back for her. She was nowhere in sight.

In a miserable hallway on the second floor of a dingy brick building,
he obeyed the legend over a button in the wall, which read:
"Landlord--push the button." The result was that a squint-eyed man
came from a door marked "office" and yawningly asked him his business.
Hiram wished a twenty-five-cent room, he said. He was taken to one,
which was not a room at all, but a stall--that is, the thin board
partitions did not connect with the ceiling by three feet. The bed was
a single one, and the sheets had brought the proprietor many a
twenty-five-cent piece since coming from the laundry. The additional
furnishings of the "room" were six nails driven in the board wall to
hold one's clothes. From all over the floor came lusty snores and the
mutterings of world-worn men.

With the city smells still in his nostrils, the buzz of city life still
in his ears, and the countless lights twinkling in a frame about the
white face of a brown-haired, red-lipped girl, he fell asleep from
sheer fatigue. But with unaccountable perversity his dreaming mind
dwelt not upon the beautiful vision he had come to love in fifteen
seconds, but on the whispering firs and twinkling streams of Mendocino,
and on a plodding ten-horse jerkline team hauling tanbark over the
mountains to the coast.

CHAPTER IV

TWITTER OR TWEET

Hiram Hooker washed in the community lavatory in the hall next morning.
Then he sought the squint-eyed landlord and paid a week's room rent in
advance, thereby saving fifty cents.

He wished to strike out at once after breakfast to begin justifying
Uncle Sebastian's faith in him, but so far he had not laid a plan. He
noticed lettering on a door in the hall which dignified what lay beyond
as a "lounging room." The door stood ajar, and he saw that the room
was empty. He decided to go in and think. A thousand and one wonders
awaited his curious eyes, but they must wait. His hundred dollars had
dwindled perceptibly; it was time to give his future a practical
thought or two.

In the "lounging room" were a long plain board writing-table, ten
ye