The clerk laughed, and replied: "Let's have a drink. I've just got enough to get drunk on." "You're drunk already," the doctor answered gruffly. "I'll be drunker before the morning," the clerk remarked, with a feeble laugh. "I wish I had Dresser here; I'd like to pound him once." That desire was repeated in the looks of many men, who were still glowering at the afternoon's quotations. Carson, the idol of the new "promotions," seemed to be the man most in demand for pounding. Einstein was explaining to a savage customer why he had advised him to buy "Rag." "I got it over the telephone this morning from a man very close to Carson that Rag was the thing, the peach of the whole lot. He said it was slated to cross Biscuit to-day." The man growled and ground a cigar stub into the floor. "Come, we'll have a drink," a white-faced young fellow called out to an old man, an acquaintance of the hour. "Somebody's got my money!" The two passed out arm in arm. Webber had his drink, and then another. Then he leaned back in the embrasure of the bar-room window and looked at Sommers. "I guess it's the lake this time. I can't go back to her and tell her it's all up." Sommers watched the man closely, trying to determine how far the disease had gone. Webber's vain, rather weak face was disguised with a beard, which made him look older than he was, and the arm that rested on the table trembled nervously from the flaccid fingers to the shoulder-blades. "They've put up some trick between them," Webber continued, in a grumbling tone. "Carson or Porter is making something by selling Rag. They'd ought to be in the penitentiary." "What rot!" Sommers remarked deliberately. "They've beaten you at your game, and they will every time, because they have more nerve than you, and because they know more. There's no use in damning them. You'd do the same thing if you knew when to do it." "They're nothing but sharps!" the clerk protested feebly, insistent like a child on his idea that some one had done him a personal injury. Sommers shrugged his shoulders in despair. "I must be going," he said at last. "I don't suppose you'll take my advice, and perhaps the lake would be the best thing for you. But you'd better try it again--it's just as well that everything has gone this time. There won't be any chance of going back to the game. Tell her, and if she'll take you, marry her at once, and start with the little people. Or stay here and have a few more drinks," he added, as he read the irresolute look upon Webber's face. The clerk rose wearily and followed the doctor into the street, as if afraid of being alone. "You needn't be so rough," he muttered. "There are lots of the big fellows who started the same way--in the market, wheat or stocks. And I had a little ambition to be something better than a clerk. I wanted her to have something different. She's as good as those girls Dresser is always talking to her about."