nty of jaw in the lower part of his face. Nor was his
tailor altogether answerable for his shoulders. Three years before this
time Ross Wilbur had pulled at No. 5 in his varsity boat in an Eastern
college that was not accustomed to athletic discomfiture.

"I wonder what I'm going to do with myself until supper time," he
muttered, as he came down the steps, feeling for the middle of his
stick. He found no immediate answer to his question. But the afternoon
was fine, and he set off to walk in the direction of the town, with a
half-formed idea of looking in at his club.

At his club he found a letter in his box from his particular chum, who
had been spending the month shooting elk in Oregon.

"Dear Old Man," it said, "will be back on the afternoon you
receive this. Will hit the town on the three o'clock boat. Get
seats for the best show going--my treat--and arrange to assimilate
nutriment at the Poodle Dog--also mine. I've got miles of talk in
me that I've got to reel off before midnight. Yours.
"JERRY."

"I've got a stand of horns for you, Ross, that are Glory Hallelujah."

"Well, I can't go," murmured Wilbur, as he remembered the Assembly that
was to come off that night and his engaged dance with Jo Herrick. He
decided that it would be best to meet Jerry as he came off the boat and
tell him how matters stood. Then he resolved, since no one that he
knew was in the club, and the instalment of the Paris weeklies had not
arrived, that it would be amusing to go down to the water-front and loaf
among the shipping until it was time for Jerry's boat.

Wilbur spent an hour along the wharves, watching the great grain ships
consigned to "Cork for orders" slowly gorging themselves with whole
harvests of wheat from the San Joaquin Valley; lumber vessels for Durban
and South African ports settling lower and lower to the water's level as
forests of pine and redwood stratified themselves along their decks and
in their holds; coal barges discharging from Nanaimo; busy little tugs
coughing and nuzzling at the flanks of the deep-sea tramps, while hay
barges and Italian whitehalls came and went at every turn. A Stockton
River boat went by, her stern wheel churning along behind, like a
huge net-reel; a tiny maelstrom of activity centred about an Alaska
Commercial Company's steamboat that would clear for Dawson in the
morning.

No quarter of one of the most picturesque cities in the world had more
i