he great cosmopolitan city, had
repudiated him. For Broadway is a place for presents or futures; she has
no welcome for pasts. With her, charity begins at home--and stays there.

Garrison drifted hither and thither with every cross eddy of humanity,
and finally dropped into the steady pulsating, ever-moving tide on the
west curb going south--the ever restless tide that never seems to reach
the open sea. As he passed one well-known cafe after another his mind
carried him back over the waste stretch of "It might have been" to
the time when he was their central figure. On every block he met
acquaintances who had even toasted him--with his own wine; toasted
him as the kingpin. Now they either nodded absently or became suddenly
vitally interested in a show-window or the new moon.

All sorts and conditions of men comprised that list of former friends,
and not one now stepped out and wrung his hand; wrung it as they had
only the other day, when they thought he would retrieve his fortunes by
pulling off the Carter Handicap. They did not wring it now, for there
was nothing to wring out of it. Now he was not only hopelessly down
in the muck of poverty, but hopelessly dishonored. And gentlemanly
appearing blackguards, who had left all honesty in the cradle, now
wouldn't for the world be seen talking on Broadway to little Billy
Garrison, the horribly crooked jockey.

It wouldn't do at all. First, because their own position was so
precarious that a breath would send it tottering. Secondly, because
Billy might happen to inconveniently remember all the sums of money he
had "loaned" them time and again. Actual necessity might tend to waken
his memory. For they had modernized the proverb into: "A friend in need
is a friend to steer clear of."

A lesson in mankind and the making had been coming to Garrison, and in
that short walk down Broadway he appreciated it to the uttermost.

"Think I had the mange or the plague," he mused grimly, as a plethoric
ex-alderman passed and absent-mindedly forgot to return his bow--an
alderman who had been tipped by Garrison in his palmy days to a small
fortune. "What if I had thrown the race?" he ran on bitterly. "Many a
jockey has, and has lived to tell it. No, there's more behind it all
than that. I've passed sports who wouldn't turn me down for that. But I
suppose Bender" (the plethoric alderman) "staked a pot on Sis, she being
the favorite and I up. And when he loses he forgets the times I tipped