cry the others down.

Frank Lyman, he of the steady head, who was quiet or hilarious as he
willed, but was never beyond the point where he willed to be, sat
watching good-humoredly from his corner, and noted that Jimmie Mason's
voice had risen the loudest, and that he, too, had forgotten the motif.

Pellams had wandered into the outer room "to bust the proprietor's
blamed old nickel-machine and get even," leaving the disturbance to
subside of its own weight. Coming back suddenly to the door, he cried:
"Hey, I've got 'em! The raw material and the finished product! Let's
have a temperance lecture from Lyman."

It was a queer group at the door. The half-gone Pellams, with his face
flushed and his hair dishevelled, in one of his hands little Lupe,
hanging to an empty pail and between laughter and tears; the other hand
tight on the collar of as dirty, as unkempt, and as drunken an old
loafer as ever hung over a Mayfield bar. Pellams swung the ruin in.

"Now, tell us how you got that fine, large tee!" said the tormentor.
"Orate to us, General Jackson!"

The old man braced himself, with drunken dignity, against the door.

"You young fellows c'n make fools o' yourselves," he said, "but you
can't make fool o' me."

"That's all right, pardner--Nature saved us the trouble in your case,"
said Pellams, the thoughtless.

The clear head in the room--Lyman's always--took it all in; Frank made a
step to come between the Junior and his victim. Then he turned,
half-unconsciously, toward Mason. Jimmie was standing with his hands on
the table, looking straight before him, and in that look Frank read the
certainty that the case was out of his control. For the Face was rising
before Jimmie Mason once more; it had twisted itself in with the
relaxed, foolish features before him, until he saw his father there, a
mock and a shame. It was not his father, of course--he passed his hand
before his eyes as though to clear them--but suppose that somewhere else
a crowd had his father--and he not there to----

The Angel of Pity, or the Universal Conscience, or whatever it is that
you and I have learned from our books and our teachers to put as our
symbol of the belief in the higher things, wrote upon his records that
night that a prayer had gone up, for the first time, from the dingy back
room of the Hotel Mayfield.

Pellams had the old man singing now, in a cracked, maudlin voice, and
his keeper was beating time with a billiard cue. Then the