"Oh, yes! Cassowary"--he pronounced the word lingeringly as though to prolong his pleasure in it--"real name doesn't matter. His father rolled up a big wad cutting the forest primeval into lumber, and left it to Cassowary--matter of a million or two. Cassowary had been driven to drink by an unhappy love-affair when I plucked him as a brand from burning Broadway. Nice chap, but too much self-indulgence; never had any discipline. He's pretty well broken in now, and as we seemed to need each other we follow the long trail together. Manage to hit it off first-rate. He's still mooning over the girl; tough that he can't have the only thing in the world he wants! Obstreperous parent adumbrated in the foreground, shotgun in hand. I don't allow Cassowary to carry any money--would rather risk contamination myself than expose him to it. If he stays with me for a few years, his accumulated income will roll up so that he can endow orchestras and art museums all through the prairie towns of the West, and become a great benefactor of mankind." Hood's story was manifestly absurd, and yet he invested it with a certain plausibility. Even Cassowary, as Hood described him, seemed a wholly credible person, and the bills Hood had drawn from his pocket bore all the marks of honest money. Dinner was announced, and Hood lounged down-stairs and into the dining-room arm in arm with Deering. A tapestry on the wall immediately attracted his attention. After pecking at the edges with his long, slender fingers he turned to his seat with a sigh. "Preposterous imitation! I dare say it was passed off as a real Gobelin, but I know the artist who fakes those things--a New Jersey genius and very smooth at the game." Deering had never paid the slightest attention to the tapestry, which had hung in the room for a dozen years, but he apologized in a vein of irony for its spuriousness, and steeled himself against complaints of the food; but after tasting the soup Hood praised it with enthusiasm. He was wholly at ease, and his table manners were beyond criticism. He seemed indifferent to the construction Deering or the bewildered Briggs might place upon his confessions, to which he now glibly addressed himself. "A couple of years ago I was roaming through the Western provinces with a couple of old friends who persist--against my advice, I assure you--in the childish pastime of safe-blowing. We got pinched _en bloc_, and as I was broke I had to sponge on the yeggs to get me out of jail." Briggs dropped a plate and Deering frowned at the interruption. Hood went on tranquilly: