Chapter 21 - Page 2

of chance enticing, and its liquor was the finest, the smoothest, the most inspiriting his tongue had ever tested. Old friends were everywhere, and new ones, too, for that matter. Among them were alluring women who smiled and sparkled. Each place 'Poleon entered was the home of carnival.

By midnight he was gloriously drunk. Ere daylight came he had sung himself hoarse, he had danced two holes in his moccasins, and had conducted three fist-fights to a satisfactory if not a successful conclusion. It had been a celebration that was to live in his memory. He strode blindly off to bed, shouting his complete satisfaction with himself and with the world, retired without undressing, and then sang himself to sleep, regardless of the protests of the other lodgers.

"Say! That Frenchman is a riot," Kid Bridges declared while he and Lucky Broad were at breakfast. "He's old General Rough-houser, and he set an altogether new mark in disorderly conduct last night. Letty 'most cried about it."

"Yeah? Those yokels are all alike--one drink and they declare a dividend." Lucky was only mildly concerned. "I s'pose the vultures picked him clean."

"Nothin' like it," Bridges shook his head. "He gnawed 'em naked, then done a war-dance with their feathers in his hat. He left 'em bruised an' bleedin'."

For a time the two friends ate in silence, then Broad mused, aloud: "Letty 'most cried, eh? Say, I wonder what she really thinks of him?"

"I don't know. Miller told me she was all broke up, and I was goin' to take her home and see if I could fathom her true feelin's, but--Phillips beat me to it."

"Phillips! He'll have to throw out the life-line if Laure gets onto that. She'll take to Letty just like a lone timber-wolf."

"Looks like she'd been kiddin' us, don't it? She calls him her 'brother' and he says she's his masseur--you heard him, didn't you?" There was another pause. "What's a masseur, anyhow?"

"A masseur," said Mr. Broad, "is one of those women in a barber- shop that fixes your fingernails. Yes, I heard him, and I'm here to say that I didn't like the sound of it. I don't yet. He may mean all right, but--them foreigners have got queer ideas about their women. Letty's a swell kid and she's got a swell job. What's more, she's got a wise gang riding herd on her. It's just like she was in a church--no danger, no annoyance, nothing. If Doret figures to start a barber-shop with her for his masseur, why, we'll have to lay him low with one of his own razors."

Mr. Bridges nodded his complete approval of this suggestion. "Right-o! I'll bust a mirror with him myself. Them barber-shops is no place for good girls."

Broad and Bridges pondered the matter during the day, and that evening they confided their apprehensions to