We strode down King Street together, past the corner of Yonge Street, below the windows of the hated Temperance and General Life Assurance Company where I had licked stamps, and on towards the Hub Hotel. The Toronto air was fresh and sweet, the lake lay blue beyond, the sunlight sparkled. Something exhilarating and optimistic in the atmosphere gave thought a happy and sanguine twist. It was a day of Indian summer, a faint perfume of far-distant forest fires adding a pleasant touch to the familiar smell of the cedar-wood sidewalks. A mood of freedom, liberty, great spaces, fine big enterprises in a free country where everything was possible, of opportunities seized and waves of fortune taken on their crest--I remember this mood as sharply still, and the scent of a wood-fire or a cedar pencil recalls it as vividly still, as though I had experienced it last week. I glanced at my companion. I liked him, trusted him. There was a happy light in his frank blue eyes. He was a good heavy-weight boxer too. The very man, I felt, for a bold enterprise of this sort. He talked the whole way. He was describing how we might increase the fortune we should draw out of our successful venture in a year’s time, when we passed Tim Sullivan, standing at the door of his, a rival, saloon, and exchanged a nod with him. The Irishman had a shadow on his face. “He’s heard about it,” whispered Kay, with a chuckle. “He’ll look glummer still when he sees all his customers coming across the way to us!” Turning down a narrow side street, the Hub blocked the way, a three-story building with a little tower, clean windows, and two big swinging doors. It ran through to a back street where there was another entrance. “Here it is,” said Kay, in the eager, happy voice of a man who has just inherited a family mansion and come to inspect it. “This is the Hub where we shall make our fortune.” It seemed to me I had entered an entirely new world. Everything was spotless. The rows of bottles and glasses, the cash-register and brass taps glittered in the sunlight that fell through coloured windows. The perfume of stale liquor was not as disagreeable as it sounds. In one sense the whole place looked as harmless as the aisle of some deserted church. I stood just inside those swing-doors, which had closed behind me, with a strange feeling of gazing at some den of vice reconstructed in the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussaud’s. Empty and innocent as the bar might appear, however, there was a thrill of adventure, even of danger, about it that reached my mind, with a definite shock of dread. “Nice, airy premises, with plenty of room,” Kay’s cheery voice came to me from a distance. “This is the principal bar. Twenty men could line up easily. It’ll want four bar-tenders.... There’s another bar at the end. There’ll be a few fights there before we’ve done. The dining-room lies through that archway just between the two.”