in Wyoming, and he's on here trying to be a
cartoonist--runs a hoisting engine day times and goes to an art school
evenings. How's that, eh?"

"Sounds batty," says I. "There's most as many would-be cartoonists as
there are nutty ones tryin' to write plays for Belasco."

"But this Blake's going to get there," says Mortimer. "I was up in his
room Sunday, and he showed me some of his work. Clever stuff, a lot of
it. He's landed a couple of things already. Then there's old man
McQuade, the one with the whiskers. Say, he's been all over the
world,--Siberia, Africa, Japan, South America. Used to be selling
agent for a mill supply firm. He has all his savings invested in an
Egyptian cotton plantation that hasn't begun to pay yet, but he thinks
it will soon. You ought to hear the yarns he can spin, though!"

"So-o-o?" says I.

"But Aronwitz is the fellow I'm traveling' around with most just now,"
goes on Mortimer enthusiastic. "Say, he's a wonder! Been over here
from Hungary only six years, worked his way through Columbia, copping
an A. M. and an A. B., and sending back money to his old mother right
along. He's a Socialist, or something, and writes for one of those
East Side papers. Then evenings he teaches manual training in a slum
settlement house. He took me over with him the other night and got me
to help him with his boys. My, but they're a bright lot of
youngsters--right off the street too! I've promised to take a class
myself."

"In what," says I, "table etiquette?"

"I'm going to start by explaining to them how a gasolene engine works,"
says Mortimer. "They're crazy to learn anything like that. It will be
great sport."

"Mortimer," says I, "a little more of that, and I'll believe you're the
guy that put the seed in succeed. Anyone wouldn't guess you was doin'
penance."

"I feel that I'm really living at last," says he in earnest.

So in that next report to Mother, after I'd thanked her for the last
check and filled in the usual health chart and so on, I proceeds to
throw in a few extras about how Son was makin' the great discovery that
most folks was more or less human, after all. Oh, I spread myself on
that part of it, givin' full details!

"And if that don't charm an extra five out of the old girl," thinks I,
"I miss my guess."

Does it? Well, say, that happy thought stays with me for about ten
days. At times I figured the bonus might be as high as a fifty. And
then one mornin' h