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fingers, and no quiet zones were enforced for soup. It was a very homelike place to persons who lived in that sort of home. Physically it was as bare as a barn from cellar to attic; the floors were uncarpeted and unpainted; the wall paper in various stages of discolouration. The furniture instead of appearing to furnish the rooms gave an impression of further desolation. Two or three of the rooms leaked.

Abner Teeftallow was a boarder at the Scovell House and Mr. Tug Beavers was another. These two young men occupied the same room and the same bed. Neither had exactly wanted the other for a room mate, but the mere fact that they had entered Irontown together had caught them in the threads of a social entanglement which neither had the deftness to escape. Unable to separate, they went to the same hotel together, asked simultaneously for a room; the landlady, a lank, grease-spotted woman, showed them upstairs to a room containing one bed under the impression they were boon companions. She did suggest feebly that she put in another bed, but hill courtesy demanded that the boys protest, which they did, and the subject was dropped.

Abner was privately dismayed at the bedfellow whom circumstance had thrust upon him, and Mr. Beavers was privately disgusted.

On this particular afternoon when Abner entered his room he found Mr. Beavers just preparing to go out. It was to be a social call—Abner knew that, because Tug was oiling his automatic pistol and occasionally he paused to whip it up and snap it at some object in the mean room.

Tug glanced up from this work and asked with a certain mockery in his drawl, "Did je git yore money, Abner?"

The youth silently drew out his three bills and two quarters and displayed them.

"Didn't deposit none!" ejaculated Mr. Beavers, genuinely surprised. Then, after a moment with a hopeful grin, "What did you say to him?"

"Nothin’; he jest handed me the money right off an’—an’ offered me five hunderd more."