the can carefully upon the ground between his legs, he covered it with his hat and waited anxiously whatever impended.
Out of the darkness emerged a man as filthy ragged as he. The new-comer, who might have been fifty, and might have been sixty, was grotesquely fat. He bulged everywhere. He was composed of bulges. His bulbous nose was the size and shape of a turnip. His eyelids bulged and his blue eyes bulged in competition with them. In many places the seams of his garments had parted across the bulges of body. His calves grew into his feet, for the broken elastic sides of his Congress gaiters were swelled full with the fat of him. One arm only he sported, from the shoulder of which was suspended a small and tattered bundle with the mud caked dry on the outer covering from the last place he had pitched his doss. He advanced with tentative caution, made sure of the harmlessness of the man beside the fire, and joined him.
“Hello, grandpa,” the new-comer greeted, then paused to stare at the other’s flaring, sky-open nostril. “Say, Whiskers, how’d ye keep the night dew out of that nose o’ yourn?”
Whiskers growled an incoherence deep in his throat and spat into the fire in token that he was not pleased by the question.
“For the love of Mike,” the fat man chuckled, “if you got caught out in a rainstorm without an umbrella you’d sure drown, wouldn’t you?”
“Can it, Fatty, can it,” Whiskers muttered wearily. “They ain’t nothin’ new in that line of chatter. Even the bulls hand it out to me.”
“But you can still drink, I hope”; Fatty at the same time mollified and invited, with his one hand deftly pulling the slip-knots that fastened his bundle.
From within the bundle he brought to light a twelve-ounce bottle of alki. Footsteps coming down the embankment alarmed him, and he hid the bottle under his hat on the ground between his legs.
But the next comer proved to be not merely one of their own ilk, but likewise to have only one arm. So forbidding of aspect was he that greetings consisted of no more than grunts. Huge-boned, tall, gaunt to cadaverousness, his face a dirty death’s head, he was as repellent a nightmare of old age as ever Dore imagined. His toothless, thin-lipped mouth was a cruel and bitter slash under a great curved nose that almost met the chin and that was like a buzzard’s beak. His one hand, lean and crooked, was a talon. The beady grey eyes, unblinking and unwavering, were bitter as death, as bleak as absolute zero and as merciless. His presence was a chill, and Whiskers and Fatty instinctively drew together for protection against the unguessed threat of him. Watching his chance, privily, Whiskers snuggled a chunk of rock several pounds in weigh close to his hand if need for action should arise. Fatty duplicated the performance.
Then both sat licking their lips, guiltily embarrassed, while the unblinking eyes of the terrible one bored into them, now into one, now into another, and then down at the rock-chunks of their preparedness.
“Huh!” sneered the terrible one, with such dreadfulness of menace as to cause Whiskers and Fatty involuntarily to close their hands down on their cave-man’s weapons.
“Huh!” the other repeated, reaching his one talon into his side coat pocket with swift definiteness. “A hell of a chance you two cheap bums ’d have with me.”
The talon emerged, clutching ready for action a six-pound iron quoit.
“We ain’t lookin’ for trouble, Slim,” Fatty quavered.
“Who in hell are you to call me ‘Slim’?” came the snarling answer.
“Me? I’m just Fatty, an’ seein’ ’s I never seen you before - ”
“An’ I suppose that’s Whiskers, there, with the gay an’ festive lamp tan-going into his eyebrow an’ the God- forgive-us nose joy-riding all over his mug?”
“It’ll do, it’ll do,” Whiskers muttered uncomfortably. “One monica’s as good as another, I find, at my time of life. And everybody hands it out to me anyway. And I need an umbrella when it rains to keep from getting drowned, an’ all the rest of it.”
“I ain’t used to company - don’t like it,” Slim growled. “So if you guys want to stick around, mind your step, that’s all, mind your step.”
He fished from his pocket a cigar stump, self-evidently shot from the gutter, and prepared to put it in his mouth to chew. Then he changed his mind, glared at his companions savagely, and unrolled his bundle. Appeared in his hand a druggist’s bottle of alki.
“Well,” he snarled, “I suppose I gotta give you cheap skates a drink when I ain’t got more’n enough for a good petrification for myself.”
Almost a softening flicker of light was imminent in his withered face as he beheld the others proudly lift their hats and exhibit their own supplies.
“Here’s some water for the mixin’s,” Whiskers said, proffering his tomato-can of river slush. “Stockyards just above,” he added apologetically. “But they say - ”
“Huh!” Slim snapped short, mixing the drink. “I’ve drunk worse’n stockyards in my time.”
Yet when all was ready, cans of alki in their solitary hands, the three things that had once been men hesitated, as if of old habit, and next betrayed shame as if at self-exposure.
Whiskers was the first to brazen it.
“I’ve sat in at many a finer drinking,” he bragged.
“With the pewter,” Slim sneered.
“With the silver,” Whiskers corrected.
Slim turned a scorching eye-interrogation on Fatty.
Fatty nodded.
“Beneath the salt,” said Slim.
“Above it,” came Fatty’s correction. “I was born above it, and I’ve never travelled second class. First or steerage, but no intermediate in mine.”
“Yourself?” Whiskers queried of Slim.
“In broken glass to the Queen, God bless her,” Slim answered, solemnly, without snarl or sneer.
“In the pantry?” Fatty insinuated.
Simultaneously Slim reached for his quoit, and Whiskers and Fatty for their rocks.
“Now don’t let’s get feverish,” Fatty said, dropping his own weapon. “We aren’t scum. We’re gentlemen. Let’s drink like gentlemen.”
“Let it be a real drinking,” Whiskers approved.
“Let’s get petrified,” Slim agreed. “Many a distillery’s flowed under the bridge since we were gentlemen; but let’s forget the long road we’ve travelled since, and hit our doss in the good old fashion in which every gentleman went to bed when we were young.”
“My father done it - did it,” Fatty concurred and corrected, as old recollections exploded long-sealed brain- cells of connotation and correct usage.
The other two nodded a descent from similar fathers, and elevated their tin cans of alcohol.
By the time each had finished his own bottle and from his rags fished forth a second one, their brains were well-mellowed and a-glow, although they had not got around to telling their real names. But their English had improved. They spoke it correctly, while the argo of tramp-land ceased from their lips.
“It’s my constitution,” Whiskers was explaining. “Very few men could go through what I have and live to tell the tale. And I never took any care of myself. If what the moralists and the physiologists say were true, I’d have been dead long ago. And it’s the same with you two. Look at us, at our advanced years, carousing as the young ones don’t dare, sleeping out in the open on the ground, never sheltered from frost nor rain nor storm, never afraid of pneumonia or rheumatism that would put half the young ones on their backs in hospital.”
He broke off to mix another drink, and Fatty took up the tale.
“And we’ve had our fun,” he boasted, “and speaking of sweethearts and all,” he cribbed from Kipling, “‘We’ve rogued and we’ve ranged - ’”
“‘In our time,’” Slim completed the crib for him.
“I should say so, I should say so,” Fatty confirmed. “And been loved by princesses - at least I have.”
“Go on and tell us about it,” Whiskers urged. “The night’s young, and why shouldn’t we remember back to the roofs of kings?”
Nothing loth, Fatty cleared his throat for the recital and cast about in his mind for the best way to begin.
“It must be known that I came of good family. Percival Delaney, let us say, yes, let us say Percival Delaney,
