"Another!" he lamented in simulated despair. But the next moment all the bantering light went from his face, while his eyes flashed in lightning-like appraisement over Denny's lean shoulder-heavy body, from his feet, small and narrow in spite of the clumsy high boots, to his clean-cut head, and back again. There was a hint of businesslike eagerness in that swift calculation of possibilities. The boy shifted consciously under the scrutiny. "It isn't that he never was able to whip me--even when he was a kid," he tried to explain. "It--it's because I don't believe, somehow, that he ever could." All the strained eagerness disappeared from the face of the pudgy man in brown. He laughed softly, a short little laugh of amusement at his own momentary folly. "Whew!" he murmured. "I'm getting to be just as bad as all the rest!" He felt in a pocket for a card and scribbled an address across its back. A trace of good-natured familiarity--the first hint of superiority that had marked his manner--accompanied his gesture when he extended it in one hand. It savored of the harmless humoring of a childish vagary. "If you ever did chance to get as far from home as that, there's a man at that address who'd fall on your neck and weep real tears if you happened to have the stuff," he said. "But just one additional word. Maybe I've led you astray a bit. Just because I said that Jed The Red is a second-rater, don't think for a moment that he fights like a schoolboy now. He doesn't--nothing like that!" He gazed for another second at the boy's thin, grave face, so like, in its very thinness and gravity, all that a composite of its Puritan forbears might have been. And as he became suddenly conscious of that resemblance he reversed the card, a whimsical twist touching his lips, and wrote above his own name, "Introducing the Pilgrim," and put it in the outstretched hand. "Any idea when you expect to make a start?" he inquired with an elaborate negligence that brought the hot color to the boy's cheeks. But again, at the words, he caught, too, a glimpse of the unshaken certainty that backed their gray gravity. "Tomorrow, I reckon. It'll take me all of today to get things fixed up so I can leave. I'll take this train in the morning. And they--they ought to have told you at the hotel that it's always a half-hour late." Young Denny rose. "Surely--surely," the chubby man agreed. "Nothing like getting away with the bell. And--er--there's one other thing. Of course if it's a little private affair, I'll bow myself gracefully out, but I do confess to a lot of curiosity concerning that small souvenir." His eyes traveled to the red welt across the boy's chin. "May I inquire just how it happened?" Denny failed to understand him at first; then his finger lifted and touched the wound interrogatively. "This?" he inquired. The man in brown nodded.