That accumulated hoard of the years had been Eph’s safeguard against old age. He had expected it would one day make him comfortable while he smoked, and sang, and waited his time to die; he had known it would always keep him out of the institutions he dreaded. But now it was gone; and when he thought of this fact, Eph felt stripped and defenseless and afraid. So now he was afraid; he hushed his mirth and touched his cap to Ragan. “Yas suh,” he said respectfully. “Get along home to bed,” Ragan advised him. “I’m gone,” said Eph; and he went. Ragan, considering the matter afterward, wondered if old Eph’s mind might not indeed be weakening. He decided to keep an eye on the darky. He thought, during the next month, that Eph was aging. The old negro was growing thin; and Ragan guessed this might be the sudden wastage of age. But he was wrong. It was something distinctly more tangible. It was a matter of money, and of food. Times were tightening purse-strings. There were a thousand calls for money besetting every man; and each had the high urge of country behind it. People who had never considered dollars before began to count pennies. A quarter thrown to Eph would buy a thrift stamp.... And men, thinking this, returned the quarter to their pockets and turned away. Old Eph, after all, was only a beggar. No doubt he wasted his money on rum; or if not that, he must own at least one “three-decker” that brought him in fat rents. The legend of the wealth of beggars harassed Eph and was like to ruin him. He did his best; he labored manfully; he descended to covert pleadings.... One week in mid-December, he had only nine dollars and thirty cents on the appointed day. He borrowed the remaining seventy cents from the lawyer, and repaid the loan next day, in spite of that gentleman’s insistence. “Naw suh,” Eph told him proudly. “Dis heah’s my arrangement, suh. I’ll manage. Lemme alone.” The next week he brought ten dollars; and the next. But for two days of that second week he ate nothing. He admitted this, in the bleak dawn, when he stopped for a whispered colloquy with the stone figure of his old Colonel, at the Memorial. “But dat ain’ no matter, suh,” he assured the inscrutable officer. “Dis ol’ coon don’ need tuh eat. Nothin’ but skin an’ bone, anyhow. Lawdy, suh, whut good is vittles tuh me?” Cold had struck down on Boston in December; and it held and intensified as January came. Sometimes people, listening to Eph’s singing, thought the old man must be shivering where he sat upon the stones; and Ragan drove him away two or three nights and bade him warm himself. But each time Eph looked at him with such pitiful entreaty against this kindness that Ragan gave up. “Have it your own way, you old idiot,” he told Eph. “If you want to freeze, go ahead and freeze. But don’t look at a man like he’s kicked you....” “Yas suh,” said Eph. “Thank’e kindly, suh.”