Produced by Roger Frank and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net [Illustration: He drank deeply, then struggled to a sitting posture, his face whitening beneath its tan.] ANYTHING ONCE BY DOUGLAS GRANT AUTHOR OF "THE SINGLE TRACK," "BOOTY," "THE FIFTH ACE," ETC. Frontispiece by PAUL STAHR [Illustration] NEW YORK W. J. WATT & COMPANY PUBLISHERS COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY W. J. WATT & COMPANY PRESS OF BRAUNWORTH & CO. BOOK MANUFACTURERS BROOKLYN, N. Y. CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I. A Roadside Meeting 1 II. Partners 17 III. The Vendor Of Everything 41 IV. Under The Big Top 55 V. Concerning An Omelet 69 VI. The Red Note-Book 83 VII. Revelations 99 VIII. Journey's End 118 IX. The Long, Long Trail 138 ANYTHING ONCE CHAPTER I A Roadside Meeting The white dust, which lay thick upon the wide road between rolling fields of ripened grain, rose in little spirals from beneath the heavy feet of the plodding farm-horses drawing the empty hay-wagon, and had scarcely settled again upon the browning goldenrod and fuzzy milkweed which bordered the rail fences on either side when Ebb Fischel's itinerant butcher-jitney rattled past. Ebb Fischel's eyes were usually as sharp as the bargains he drove, but the dust must have obscured his vision. Otherwise he would have seen the man lying motionless beside the road, with his cap in the ditch and the pitiless sun of harvest-time caking the blood which had streamed from an ugly cut upon his temple. But the meat-cart jolted on and out of sight, and for a long time nothing disturbed the stillness except the distant whirring of a reaper and nearer buzzing of a fat, inquisitive bluebottle fly, which paused to see what this strange thing might be, and then zoomed off excitedly to tell his associates. At length there came a dry rustling in the tall standing wheat in the field on the opposite side of the road, and a head and shoulders appeared above the topmost fence-rail. It was a small head covered with tow-colored hair, which had been slicked back and braided so tightly that the short, meager cue curled outward and up in a crescent, as though it were wired, and the shoulders beneath the coarse blue-and-white striped cotton gown were thin and peaked.