"Poor beggar! he is in the doldrums just now, and it isn't quite fair to hold him responsible for what he says or thinks--or for what he thinks he thinks," said the reporter, letting the thought slip into speech. "Just the same, I wish I had made him take that ten-dollar bill. It might have-- Why, hello, Broffin! How are you, old man? Where the dickens did you drop from?" It was the inevitable steamer acquaintance who is always at hand to prove the trite narrowness of the world, and Bainbridge kicked a chair into comradely place for him. Broffin, heavy-browed and clean-shaven save for a thick mustache that hid the hard-bitted mouth, replaced the chair to suit himself and sat down. In appearance he was a cross between a steamboat captain on a vacation, and an up-river plantation overseer recovering from his annual pleasure trip to the city. But his reply to Bainbridge's query proved that he was neither. "I didn't drop; I walked. More than that, I kept step with you all the way from Chaudiere's to the levee. You'd be dead easy game for an amateur." "You'll get yourself disliked, the first thing you know," said Bainbridge, laughing. "Can't you ever forget that you are in the man-hunting business?" "Yes; just as often, and for just as long, as you can forget that you are in the news-hunting business." "Tally!" said Bainbridge, and he laughed again. After which they sat in silence until the _Adelantado_ doubled the bend in the great river and the last outposts of the city's lights disappeared, leaving only a softened glow in the upper air to temper the velvety blackness of the April night. The steamer had passed Chalmette when Broffin said: "Speaking of Chaudiere's reminds me: who was that fellow you were telling good-by as you came out of the cafe? His face was as familiar as a ship's figure-head, but I couldn't place him." The question coupled in automatically with the reporter's train of thought; hence he answered it rather more fully and freely than he might have at another time and under other conditions. From establishing Griswold's identity for his fellow passenger, he slipped by easy stages into the story of the proletary's ups and downs, climaxing it with a vivid little word-painting of the farewell supper at Chaudiere's. "To hear him talk, you would size him up for a bloody-minded nihilist of the thirty-third degree, ready and honing to sweep the existing order of things into the farthest hence," he added. "But in reality he is one of the finest fellows in the world, gone a fraction morbid over the economic side of the social problem. He has a heart of gold, as I happen to know. He used to spend a good bit of his time in the backwater, and you know what the backwater of a big city will do to a man." "I couldn't hold my job if I didn't," was the reply.