. But why the riddle?" he finished, as he handed back the
paper.

"Why, I thought if it was true maybe I'd ask you to tell me if I--how
I could get a chance at him."

The boy's explanation was even more flounderingly abrupt than his
former question had been, but his eyes never wavered from the
newspaper man's face. The latter laid his notebook upon the truck with
exaggerated care and rose and faced him.

"Another!" he lamented in simulated despair. But the next moment all
the bantering light went from his face, while his eyes flashed in
lightning-like appraisement over Denny's lean shoulder-heavy body,
from his feet, small and narrow in spite of the clumsy high boots, to
his clean-cut head, and back again. There was a hint of businesslike
eagerness in that swift calculation of possibilities. The boy shifted
consciously under the scrutiny.

"It isn't that he never was able to whip me--even when he was a kid,"
he tried to explain. "It--it's because I don't believe, somehow, that
he ever could."

All the strained eagerness disappeared from the face of the pudgy man
in brown. He laughed softly, a short little laugh of amusement at his
own momentary folly.

"Whew!" he murmured. "I'm getting to be just as bad as all the rest!"

He felt in a pocket for a card and scribbled an address across its
back. A trace of good-natured familiarity--the first hint of
superiority that had marked his manner--accompanied his gesture when
he extended it in one hand. It savored of the harmless humoring of a
childish vagary.

"If you ever did chance to get as far from home as that, there's a man
at that address who'd fall on your neck and weep real tears if you
happened to have the stuff," he said. "But just one additional word.
Maybe I've led you astray a bit. Just because I said that Jed The Red
is a second-rater, don't think for a moment that he fights like a
schoolboy now. He doesn't--nothing like that!"

He gazed for another second at the boy's thin, grave face, so like, in
its very thinness and gravity, all that a composite of its Puritan
forbears might have been. And as he became suddenly conscious of that
resemblance he reversed the card, a whimsical twist touching his lips,
and wrote above his own name, "Introducing the Pilgrim," and put it in
the outstretched hand.

"Any idea when you expect to make a start?" he inquired with an
elaborate negligence that brought the hot color to the boy's cheeks.
But again, at the words,