to the other. There did not seem to
be any color line drawn about this transient solace. Fred took a smoke
himself.

"What are you up for?" the younger man inquired.

Fred experienced a shock. "Oh ... you see ... I just got caught in a
jam. It will come out all right."

It sounded ridiculous--this feeble attempt at pride, and Fred
regretted it, once it escaped him. But his questioner was not put out
of countenance.

"Well, if you've got a pull, it's easy; otherwise--" He finished with
a shrug and went on smoking.

Fred looked at him intently. He was a lad not much over twenty, with
thick black hair and very deep-blue eyes and an indefinable quality
which made his rather irregular features seem much more delicate than
they really were.

"What's _your_ trouble?" Fred asked, suddenly.

The boy grinned. "I rolled a guy for twenty dollars in Portsmouth
Square... He was drunk, at that," he finished, as if in justification.

At this moment the door of the cell was opened. The three white men
started forward expectantly. But it was the Chinese who was wanted. A
group of his countrymen had come to bail him out.

The man who had been silent suddenly spoke to the policeman as he was
closing the door again.

"You might as well lock me up proper for the night," he flung out,
bitterly. "I guess they're not coming to get me now."

The policeman led him away, in the wake of the disappearing Chinese.
The youth turned to Starratt with a chuckle:

"The old boy's kinda peeved, ain't he? Well, he'll get over that after
a while... The first time they jugged me I thought--"

"Then you've been up before?"

"Before?... Say, do I look like a dead one? This isn't a bad habit
after you get used to it... So far I've only made the county jails.
Some day I suppose I'll graduate... But I'm pretty wise--vagrancy is
about all they've ever pinned on me."

Fred looked at his new friend curiously. There didn't seem to be
anything particularly vicious about the youth. He merely had learned
how to get his hands on easy money and jails were an incident in his
career. Without being asked, he described his first tilt with the law.
He had come, a youth of seventeen, from a country town up North. He
had run away from home, to be exact; there was a stepmother or some
equally ancient and honorable excuse. He had arrived in San Francisco
in January without money or friends or any great moral equipment, and
after a week of purposeless bumming he h