y so suddenly that the roadster
had no excuses ready. Irresistibly, but so composedly that it seemed
almost absendmindedness on his part, the dispenser of drinks pushed
Curly to the swinging doors and kicked him out, with a nonchalance
that almost amounted to sadness. That was the way of the Southwest.

Curly arose from the gutter leisurely. He felt no anger or resentment
toward his ejector. Fifteen years of tramphood spent out of the
twenty-two years of his life had hardened the fibres of his spirit.
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune fell blunted from the
buckler of his armoured pride. With especial resignation did he suffer
contumely and injury at the hands of bartenders. Naturally, they were
his enemies; and unnaturally, they were often his friends. He had to
take his chances with them. But he had not yet learned to estimate
these cool, languid, Southwestern knights of the bungstarter, who had
the manners of an Earl of Pawtucket, and who, when they disapproved of
your presence, moved you with the silence and despatch of a chess
automaton advancing a pawn.

Curly stood for a few moments in the narrow, mesquite-paved street.
San Antonio puzzled and disturbed him. Three days he had been a non-
paying guest of the town, having dropped off there from a box car of
an I. & G.N. freight, because Greaser Johnny had told him in Des
Moines that the Alamo City was manna fallen, gathered, cooked, and
served free with cream and sugar. Curly had found the tip partly a
good one. There was hospitality in plenty of a careless, liberal,
irregular sort. But the town itself was a weight upon his spirits
after his experience with the rushing, business-like, systematised
cities of the North and East. Here he was often flung a dollar, but
too frequently a good-natured kick would follow it. Once a band of
hilarious cowboys had roped him on Military Plaza and dragged him
across the black soil until no respectable rag-bag would have stood
sponsor for his clothes. The winding, doubling streets, leading
nowhere, bewildered him. And then there was a little river, crooked as
a pot-hook, that crawled through the middle of the town, crossed by a
hundred little bridges so nearly alike that they got on Curly's
nerves. And the last bartender wore a number nine shoe.

The saloon stood on a corner. The hour was eight o'clock. Homefarers
and outgoers jostled Curly on the narrow stone sidewalk. Between the
buildings to his left he looked down