About the time that the Princess left the office to improve her social standing, Eli Martin and his big mule team came to town from the Bethel neighbourhood. He was as likely a looking red-headed country boy as you ever saw. We were laying the town waterworks pipes that year, and Eli and his team had work all summer. On the street he towered above the other men several inches in height, and he looked big and muscular and masculine in his striped undershirt and blue overalls, as he worked with his team in the hot sun. Of course, the Princess would not have seen him in those days. Her nose was seeking a higher social level, and the clerks in the White Front dry-goods store formed the pinnacle of her social ideal. But Eli Martin was naturally what in our parlance we call a ladies' man, and he was not long in learning that the wide-brimmed black hat, the ready-made faded green suit and the red string necktie which had swept the girls down before him in the Bethel neighbourhood would accomplish little in town. So when winter came, and work with his team was hard to get, he sold his mules and bedecked himself in fine linen. He had a few hundred dollars saved up, so he lived in the cabbage smells of the Astor House, and fancied that he was enjoying the refinements of a great city. Time hung heavily upon him, and at night he joined the switchmen and certain young men of leisure in the town in a more or less friendly game of poker in the rooms at the head of the dark stairway on South Main Street. When spring came the young man had no desire and little need to go back to work, for by that time he was known as Lucky Red. In a year the sunburn left him and he grew white and thin. He went to Kansas City for a season, and became known among gamblers as far west as Denver; but he was only a tin-horn gambler in the big cities, while in our town he was at the head of his profession, so he came back and opened a room of his own. He came back in a blaze of glory; to wit: a long grey frock coat with trousers to match, pleated white shirts studded with blinding diamonds, a small white hat dented jauntily on three sides, a matted lump of red hair on the back of his head and a dashing red curl combed extravagantly low on his forehead. Before he left town for his foreign tour Red Martin used to hang about the churches Sunday evenings, peering through the blinds and making eyes at the girls; but upon his return he had risen to another social level. He had acquired a cart with red wheels and a three-minute horse; so he dropped from his social list the girls who "worked out" and made eyes at those young women who lived at home, gadding around town evenings, picking up boys on the street and forever talking about their "latest."