“Because you’re the same lazy old slob you were three years ago,” chuckled a voice in his ear. Wilmerding whirled, his eyes popping, stared for a second in speechless amazement at the young man against whose shoulder he had been almost leaning. Then he fell upon him with a roar of delight. “Well, I’ll be hanged!” he gurgled. “Snow, you old cut-up, where in time have you been? I thought you’d croaked years ago. Shove along and give me a chance. You’re spread over two seats, easy.” Snowden Pell obeyed laughingly. The man beside him, taking in the situation with a good-natured grin, likewise moved, and Wilmerding was accommodated with a seat. “It takes a lot to put me out of business,” Pell chuckled when his friend had settled beside him. “I’m very far from being a dead one, as they’ll tell you out in Seattle.” “But why didn’t you write and let somebody know how you were getting on? Last I heard, your father failed, or something, and you slipped out of Princeton right in the middle of the spring term without saying a word to anybody. To this day I never knew how much of the tale was truth and how much fiction.” “It was pretty much all truth,” Pell returned quickly. “My governor’s partner got playing the Wall Street game, and smashed the business to bits. There wasn’t enough left even for me to keep on and finish the term, and when I found out how bad things were I just faded quietly away. I didn’t want any of the boys to be sorry for me, or to think that I was an object of charity, the way――” “Rot!” broke in the stout chap emphatically. “You make me sick! At least, you might have said a word to your old friends. Look over in the bleachers. They’re firing one of those sandwich-chewing-gum-cigar baskets at each other. Next thing you know they’ll be tossing some kid around.” For a moment they watched the wicker basket rise and fall as the bleacherites employed their time in playing a sort of handball with it. Here and there in a distant part of the stand men were throwing paper at one another, sporting with the inevitable straw hat which some one always seems to bring along for the purpose, and otherwise enjoying themselves. Presently Wilmerding turned again to his friend. “Well, where’d you go?” he asked. “What you been doing ever since?” “I had a job offered me in Seattle, which I snapped up. It was a good opening for me, and I’m certainly glad I got with that particular concern, even if I had to borrow money to get out there. I had the first letter from them the very day I left Princeton; and, by Jove, Oggie!”――he threw back his head and laughed at the sudden recollection――“you came mighty near being the goat.” “What do you mean?” the stout fellow inquired tartly. “You didn’t touch me, that I remember. Of course, I’d have turned you down”――his tone was one of heavy sarcasm――“but at least I’d liked to have had the chance.”