“I’m gone,” said Larry; and he turned down the cross street, while McKnight swung off in the opposite direction. VI A NEW ROOM-MATE Being well used to Colorado mountain winters, Larry had been finding the Middle-Western variety of the season rather a joke than a hardship thus far. But on the night when he parted from the founder of the Red-Wagon Scholarship at Mrs. Grant’s front gate, old Boreas was outdoing himself. Down Maple Avenue, cutting across angling behind the athletic field, the wind came howling straight out of the shivery northwest, bringing with it a storm that was half snow and half a fine sleet to sting like needles on a bare face, and to make the sidewalk as uncertain underfoot as the bottom of a soapy bath-tub. It was only two squares down to the main street of the college suburb, and then one more to Hassler’s restaurant, where Larry made his first inquiry about Purdick. Here he learned nothing except the fact that Purdick hadn’t shown up for a week and more, and that another student waiter had been put on in his place. The big, puffy-lipped German didn’t know where Purdick roomed, but he thought it was over Heffelfinger’s grocery, two squares farther down. Thither Larry posted, slipping and sliding over the treacherous sidewalks, and was lucky enough to find Heffelfinger just closing his grocery shop. Yes, Purdick had a room “oop-shtairs”――two flights up. Larry blundered into the box hall beside the grocery entrance and climbed――in darkness so thick that it was almost sticky. But there was a window in the second floor hall, and enough light from the street electrics filtered through its grimy panes to enable him to find the second stair. Groping along on the third floor, which seemed to be a sort of junk room, Larry made his way toward a thin thread of light coming from the crack under a door. The barn-like third floor was cold with the deadly chill of a shut-up space that has never been heated, and Larry had all he could do to keep his teeth from chattering. At the door with the chink of light under it he rapped, and a hoarse voice that he hardly recognized said: “Come in.” Larry wasn’t any more impressionable than he had to be, and wasn’t at all troubled with the sort of imagination that adds frills and furbelows to make a thing you remember grow into a sort of cold horror the more it is dwelt upon. Yet he thought he should never forget the desolate cheerlessness of the cubbyhole into which the opening door admitted him.