“She lied,” he said aloud. “She made believe to me that she had dared greatly, and all the while she knew the brother that brought her was waiting to take her back.” He burst into laughter. “Oh, these bourgeois! When I was broke, I was not fit to be seen with his sister. When I have a bank account, he brings her to me.”

As he swung on his heel to go on, a tramp, going in the same direction, begged him over his shoulder.

“Say, mister, can you give me a quarter to get a bed?” were the words.

But it was the voice that made Martin turn around. The next instant he had Joe by the hand.

“D’ye remember that time we parted at the Hot Springs?” the other was saying. “I said then we’d meet again. I felt it in my bones. An’ here we are.”

“You’re looking good,” Martin said admiringly, “and you’ve put on weight.”

“I sure have.” Joe’s face was beaming. “I never knew what it was to live till I hit hoboin’. I’m thirty pounds heavier an’ feel tiptop all the time. Why, I was worked to skin an’ bone in them old days. Hoboin’ sure agrees with me.”

“But you’re looking for a bed just the same,” Martin chided, “and it’s a cold night.”

“Huh? Lookin’ for a bed?” Joe shot a hand into his hip pocket and brought it out filled with small change. “That beats hard graft,” he exulted. “You just looked good; that’s why I battered you.”

Martin laughed and gave in.

“You’ve several full-sized drunks right there,” he insinuated.

Joe slid the money back into his pocket.

“Not in mine,” he announced. “No gettin’ oryide for me, though there ain’t nothin’ to stop me except I don’t want to. I’ve ben drunk once since I seen you last, an’ then it was unexpected, bein’ on an empty stomach. When I work like a beast, I drink like a beast. When I live like a man, I drink like a man — a jolt now an’ again when I feel like it, an’ that’s all.”

Martin arranged to meet him next day, and went on to the hotel. He paused in the office to look up steamer sailings. The Mariposa sailed for Tahiti in five days.

“Telephone over to-morrow and reserve a stateroom for me,” he told the clerk. “No deck-stateroom, but down below, on the weather-side, — the port-side, remember that, the port-side. You’d better write it down.”

Once in his room he got into bed and slipped off to sleep as gently as a child. The occurrences of the evening had made no impression on him. His mind was dead to impressions. The glow of warmth with which he met Joe had been most fleeting. The succeeding minute he had been bothered by the ex- laundryman’s presence and by the compulsion of conversation. That in five more days he sailed for his loved South Seas meant nothing to him. So he closed his eyes and slept normally and comfortably for eight uninterrupted hours. He was not restless. He did not change his position, nor did he dream. Sleep had become to him oblivion, and each day that he awoke, he awoke with regret. Life worried and bored him, and time was a vexation.