It was the same restless spirit, too, linked with an inborn, luring love of roving and shift of scene, that fired O'Byrn. A happy vagabond, his eyes were filled ever with the charm of new scenes that all too soon grew old. Always were fair mirages to glow on his horizon, bringing him hurrying on--to find them faded. Dream-houses, built on barren sands, dissolving in mists of tears as the years spell the bitter, brutal thing that we call wisdom! Always for him, strange little Irishman, the luring whisper from afar and the mad dash thither, to find as before only chill mists and brooding shadows; and so on, over the wastes, to silence and the end. "What have you done with yourself?" inquired Dick, as the two settled themselves comfortably before their sandwiches and coffee. "Find anything worth while?" "Oh, early in the evenin' I dropped into Ryan's roof garden," replied Micky. "The first stunt wasn't so bad; then they rang in one of those cockney carolers from dear ol' Lunnon. He got off a yowl about-- "'Wipe no more, my lidy, Oh, wipe no more to die--' and I got out. Suggested a scullery strike and business, and it was my night off. "Blew along and met a bunch of the boys at the Gold Coin. They had started in early and were left-handed in both feet and hangin' onto the bar like a freighter in a recedin' tide. They tried to annex me, but I faded away. I'm through. The budge-mixer's the natural enemy of the profesh. He gets your money and you get next, but it's never till the next morning. I knew a district attorney once, up north, who had been prosecutin' a gang of cheap thieves from a bum district of the county. He was gettin' off his final spiel, and it was a beaut'. 'Gentlemen of the jury,' he yells, 'they don't raise anything on the Pine Plains but hell and huckleberries!' and it was no lie. "Now on whisky the product's even more limited. You just raise hell. No more for me, I'm stickin' to suds. It's popular, the red-eye, but it doesn't last and then it does. There's nothing in it but a pneumatic head and a nimbus of cracked ice in the mornin'. Your Uncle Mike--Why, hello, Fatty!" Fatty Stearns had ambled in and stood regarding them with a tender smile. Glenwood pulled him into a chair and invited him to order what he wanted. Stearns was soon busy. "Just ran out for lunch," came from him in muffled tones. "I'm up to my neck in that golf game you didn't have time to do," he told Glenwood with a reproachful glance. "It's got me wingin'." There were strange gurglings from Micky, grown suddenly wild-eyed. "Fatty, Fatty!" he moaned. "Did you say 'game?'" "Sure he did!" answered Dick truculently. "What's the matter with it, you little ape? I play it." Micky dissolved in simulated sobs. "He plays it!" he groaned. "Oh, why was he ever born, Eliza? Better never have been born than born a slave!" "We will listen, Micky," remarked Dick deliberately, "to any objections you have to the greatest, most healthful--"