to see you when
you see them, and when they begin looking at you out of the corner
of their eyes the minute you turn away, why then it seems to me that
they're laughing at you, Bill."

"What they got to laugh about? I'd punch a gent in the face that
laughed at me!"

But Ronicky fell into a philosophical brooding. "It can't be done,
Bill. You can punch a gent for cussing you, or stepping on your foot,
or crowding you, or sneering at you, or talking behind your back, or
for a thousand things. But back here in a crowd you can't fight a gent
for laughing at you. Laughing is outside the law most anywheres, Bill.
It's the one thing you can't answer back except with more laughing.
Even a dog gets sort of sick inside when you laugh at him, and a man
is a pile worse. He wants to kill the gent that's laughing, and he
wants to kill himself for being laughed at. Well, Bill, that's a good
deal stronger than the way they been laughing at me, but they
done enough to make me think a bit. They been looking at three
things--these here spats, the red rim of my handkerchief sticking out
of my pocket, and that soft gray hat, when I got it on."

"Derned if I see anything wrong with your outfit. Didn't they tell you
that that was the style back East, to have spats like that on?"

"Sure," said Ronicky, "but maybe they didn't know, or maybe they go
with some, but not with me. Maybe I'm kind of too brown and outdoors
looking to fit with spats and handkerchiefs like this."

"Ronicky," said Bill Gregg in admiration, "maybe you ain't read a
pile, but you figure things out just like a book."

Their conversation was cut short by the appearance of a drift of
houses, and then more and more. From the elevated line on which they
ran presently they could look down on block after block of roofs
packed close together, or big business structures, as they reached the
uptown business sections, and finally Ronicky gasped, as they plunged
into utter darkness that roared past the window.

"We go underground to the station," Bill Gregg explained. He was
a little startled himself, but his reading had fortified him to a
certain extent.

"But is there still some more of New York?" asked Ronicky humbly.

"More? We ain't seen a corner of it!" Bill's superior information made
him swell like a frog in the sun. "This is kinder near One Hundredth
Street where we dived down. New York keeps right on to First Street,
and then it has a lot more streets below that. B