“Let's send him in for beer,” the other proposed; and a new animation stirred the dilapidated one and the talker. “You can go to hell!” Baggs responded without heat. “That ain't no nice way to talk,” the second proclaimed. “Peebles, here, meant that them who has divides with all that hasn't.” Peebles directed a hard animosity at Harry Baggs. His gaze flickered over the latter's heavy-set body and unmoved face. “Want your jaw slapped crooked?” he demanded with a degree of reservation. “No,” the boy placidly replied. A stillness enveloped them, accentuated by the minute crackling of the disintegrating wood. The dark increased and the stars came out; the clip-clip of a horse's hoofs passed in the distance and night. Harry Baggs became flooded with sleep. “I s'pose I can stay in one of these brownstones?” he queried, indicating the huts. No one answered and he stumbled toward a small shelter. He was forced to bend, edge himself into the close damp interior, where he collapsed into instant unconsciousness on a heap of bagging. In the night he cried out, in a young strangely distressed voice; and later a drift of rain fell on the roof and ran in thin cold streams over his still body. II He woke late the following morning and emerged sluggishly into a sparkling rush of sunlight. The huts looked doubly mean in the pellucid day. They were built of discarded doors and variously painted fragments of lumber, with blistered and unpinned roofs of tin, in which rusted smokepipes had been crazily wired; strips of moldy matting hung over an entrance or so, but the others gaped unprotected. The clay before them was worn smooth and hard; a replenished fire smoked within blackened bricks; a line, stretched from a dead stump to a loosely fixed post, supported some stained and meager red undergarb. Harry Baggs recognized Peebles and the loquacious tramp at the edge of the clearing. The latter, clad in a grotesquely large and sorry suit of ministerial black, was emaciated and had a pinched bluish countenance. When he saw Baggs he moved forward with a quick uneven step. “Say,” he proceeded, “can you let me have something to get a soda-caffeine at a drug store? This ain't a stall; I got a fierce headache. Come out with a dime, will you? My bean always hurts, but to-day I'm near crazy.” Harry Baggs surveyed him for a moment, and then, without comment, produced the sum in question. The other turned immediately and rapidly disappeared toward the road. “He's crazy, all right, to fill himself with that dope,” Peebles observed; “it's turning him black. You look pretty healthy,” he added. “You can work, and they're taking all the men they can get at the Nursery.” The boy was sharply conscious of a crawling emptiness--hunger. He had only fifteen cents; when that was gone he would be without resources. “I don't mind,” he returned; “but I've got to eat first.”