a very dozen,--and in
the doorway, with arms akimbo and hands on massive hips, gaped Jap's
mulatto wife, for of such measure was the man. Graves crossed the
alley, suppressing such of his five senses as he could shift without,
and ascertained that the degenerate Jasper, true to prophecy, was
fishing from the dock in the rear.

"Good afternoon," said the caller, affably, he thought.

Jasper grunted without lifting his eyes from his float.

"What do you catch here?" pursued the candidate, beaming
good-fellowship.

The line suddenly drew taut, and a muddy fish whipped through the
sunshine within a scant inch of Graves's nose.

"Bullheads," answered the laconic Hinchey.

The visitor was disconcerted.

"You--er--eat them?" he remarked blankly, eyeing first the
beery-looking water and then the ugly fish.

"Naw," sneered Jap. "I'm foundin' 'n 'quarium." He tossed the
bullhead into a pail, and, spying a piccaninny scudding round a corner,
called: "Here, you chocolate drop, take this yer fish ter yer mammy.
Two mor,' 'n' I'll hev 'nuff fer supper. Set down," he added to his
guest.

"Thanks," said Bernard, hunting vainly for a clean spot on the
string-piece. He lit a cigarette as a sanitary precaution, and
bethought him to offer one to Hinchey.

"None o' them coffin-nails fer me," declined the Spartan. "I smokes
men's terbacker."

Graves gave him a cigar which he chanced to have about him.

"I don't seem to have a match left," he observed, fumbling in his
pockets.

Jasper Hinchey calmly relieved him of his cigarette, lit his cigar with
it, and restored the costly importation, malodorous of fish. At the
earliest opportunity Graves dropped it in the canal, a transaction duly
noted by Jap.

"I've been told you have something to say to me," the young man said
briskly, his social obligations seeming fully paid, and his eagerness
to be gone swamping diplomacy.

Jasper rebaited his hook, impaling the wriggling earthworm with a
solicitude worthy of comparison with Isaac Walton's refined martyrdom
of frogs.

"Yes," he drawled; "I kind o' 'magine I hev."

Bernard curbed his impatience while Jap spat with deadly aim at an
eddying chip.

"S'pose you know I've knocked round in pol'tics some?"

The young man said that he did. He thought "knocked" a felicitous
word. Jasper Hinchey's public services had been heavy-fisted, relating
chiefly to voting blocks of drunken Poles and Italians in warmly
contested tow