whirling dervishes.

"After I bought the tickets I missed Solly. I knew his habits by then;
so in a couple of hours I found him in a saddle-shop. They had some
new ideas there in the way of trees and girths that had strayed down
from the Canadian mounted police; and Solly was so interested that he
almost looked reconciled to live. He invested about nine hundred
dollars in there.

"At the depot I telegraphed a cigar-store man I knew in New York to
meet me at the Twenty-third Street ferry with a list of all the
saddle-stores in the city. I wanted to know where to look for Solly
when he got lost.

"Now I'll tell you what happened in New York. I says to myself:
'Friend Heherezade, you want to get busy and make Bagdad look pretty
to the sad sultan of the sour countenance, or it'll be the bowstring
for yours.' But I never had any doubt I could do it.

"I began with him like you'd feed a starving man. I showed him the
horse-cars on Broadway and the Staten Island ferry-boats. And then I
piled up the sensations on him, but always keeping a lot of warmer
ones up my sleeve.

"At the end of the third day he looked like a composite picture of
five thousand orphans too late to catch a picnic steamboat, and I was
wilting down a collar every two hours wondering how I could please him
and whether I was going to get my thou. He went to sleep looking at
the Brooklyn Bridge; he disregarded the sky-scrapers above the third
story; it took three ushers to wake him up at the liveliest vaudeville
in town.

"Once I thought I had him. I nailed a pair of cuffs on him one morning
before he was awake; and I dragged him that evening to the palm-cage
of one of the biggest hotels in the city--to see the Johnnies and the
Alice-sit-by-the-hours. They were out in numerous quantities, with the
fat of the land showing in their clothes. While we were looking them
over, Solly divested himself of a fearful, rusty kind of laugh--like
moving a folding bed with one roller broken. It was his first in two
weeks, and it gave me hope.

"'Right you are,' says I. 'They're a funny lot of post-cards, aren't
they?'

"'Oh, I wasn't thinking of them dudes and culls on the hoof,' says he.
'I was thinking of the time me and George put sheep-dip in Horsehead
Johnson's whisky. I wish I was back in Atascosa City,' says he.

"I felt a cold chill run down my back. 'Me to play and mate in one
move,' says I to myself.

"I made Solly promise to stay in the cafe for half