became very drunk. A
game of poker was started in a back room of one of the saloons on the
Barbary Coast. One of the players was a rancher named Toedt, a
fellow-boarder at the Reno House, but the two other players were
strangers; and there in that narrow, dirty room, sawdust on the floor,
festoons of fly-specked red and blue tissue paper adorning the single
swinging lamp, figures cut from bill-posters of the Black Crook pasted
on the walls, there in the still hours after midnight, long after the
barroom outside had been closed for the night, the last penny of
Vandover's estate was gambled away.

The game ended in a quarrel, Vandover, very drunk, and exasperated at
his ill luck, accusing his friend Toedt, the rancher, of cheating. Toedt
kicked him in the stomach and made him abominably sick. Then they went
away and left Vandover alone in the little dirty room, racked with
nausea, very drunk, fallen forward upon the table and crying into his
folded arms. After a little he went to sleep, but the nausea continued,
nevertheless, and in a few moments he gagged and vomited. He never
moved. He was too drunk to wake. His hands and his coat-sleeves, the
table all about him, were foul beyond words, but he slept on in the
midst of it all, inert, stupefied, a great swarm of flies buzzing about
his head and face. It was the day after this that he had come to see
Geary.

"Ah," said Geary, as he came up, "it's you, is it? Well, I didn't expect
to see you again. Sit down outside there in the hall and wait a few
minutes. I'm not ready to go yet--or, wait; here, I tell you what to
do." Geary wrote off a list of articles on a slip of paper and pushed it
across the table toward Vandover, together with a little money. "You get
those at the nearest grocery and by the time you are back I'll be ready
to go."

That day Geary took Vandover out to the Mission. They went out in the
cable-car, Geary sitting inside reading the morning's paper, Vandover
standing on the front platform, carrying the things that Geary had told
him to buy: a bar of soap, a scrubbing brush, some wiping cloths, a
broom, and a pail.

Almost at the end of the car-line they got off and crossed over to where
Geary's property stood. Vandover looked about him. The ground on which
his own block had once stood was now occupied by an immense red brick
building with white stone trimmings; in front on either side of the main
entrance were white stone medallions upon which were ch