he took gas, you know, and sometimes
just at the last there's a little struggle against it."

The Kentuckian nodded silently, and the proprietor went on: "I take it
she's not the party you were looking for, then?"

"No." The response was brusque, and with a sudden craving for the outer
air, Boone turned on his heel to go--but stopped again inside the
threshold. "If relatives don't claim her," he said, "I want her to have
a private burial. Arrange the details--and look to me for settlement."

In the office stood a little man, gray and poorly dressed, yet with that
attempt at fashion that strives through shabbiness after at least an
echo of smart effect.

"I have come to learn when this poor child is to be buried, gentlemen,"
he began, with that ready emotion which is easily stirred and runs to
volubility. "I didn't know her until a few days ago, when she took a
small room in the house where I board. She kept to herself, but her
manner was sunny and gracious, and her refinement was a matter of
comment among us. None of us suspected that she was contemplating--this!
I passed her in the hallway the night before it happened, and she smiled
at me."

Boone sat afterward in the dreary little mortuary chapel while a
clergyman whom, the undertaker said, "came in in these cases,"
performed, with the perfunctoriness of routine, the services for the
dead. Later, still with the gray little man at his side, the Kentuckian
drove in the one cab that followed the hearse to a Brooklyn cemetery
where Boone had paid for a grave. The little man, it seemed, had been a
character actor and, from his own testimony, one of ability beyond the
appreciation of a flippant present.

Their mission today recalled to his mind others of like nature, and as
he talked of them, enlarging upon the piteous helplessness of young
women whose gentle natures are unequipped for the predatory struggles of
a city where one does not know one's next-door neighbour, Boone's
anxieties grew heavier.

Those months of unavailing search stood always out luridly in his
memory, and because his search was a thing that could accommodate
itself to no rule except to follow faint trails into all sorts of
places, he grew to an astonishing familiarity with parts at least of the
town whose boast it is that no man knows it.

It was natural that he should take up his own quarters near Greenwich
Village, where the fringes of the town's self-styled bohemia trail off
from Washing