mopolitan as it can be and still retain its Senegambian motif.

Negroes from Haiti, Jamaica, Salvador, Cuba; from Morocco and Senegal;
blue-black negroes from the Pacific; ebony negroes from the South;
brown, tan, yellow, and buff negroes from everywhere inhabit San Juan.
Every language from Arabic to Spanish is spoken by these--the
cosmopolites of cosmopolitan San Juan.

_Pussonally_, Mr. Ambrose de Vere Travis spoke only English.
Because he hailed from Galveston, Tex., he spoke it with a Gulf
intonation at once liquid, rich, and musical. He stood six feet five
on his bare soles, so his voice was somewhat reminiscent of the
Vatican organ.

Ambrose was twenty-four years old. Our story finds him a New Yorker
of three years' standing, all of which he had spent as a dweller on
San Juan Hill. Originally the giant Mr. Travis had served as furnace
tender in the subterraneous portions of the Swalecliffe Arms
apartments, that turreted edifice in the Eighties that frowns across
at the Palisades from Riverside Drive. But his size and the size of
his smile had won for Ambrose the coveted and uniformed position of
door-man, a post at which he served with considerable success and
the incidental tips.

The recently wealthy Mr. Braumbauer, for instance, really felt that
he _was_ somebody, when Ambrose opened the door of his car and bowed
him under the portcullis of Swalecliffe. And y'understand me, a
feller's willing he should pay a little something for service once
in a while. And so, one way and another, Ambrose managed to eke from
his job a great deal more than he drew on pay day.

But Mr. Travis's source of income did not stop there--far from it.
He had brought from Galveston a genius for rolling sevens--or, if he
missed seven the first roll, he could generally make his point
within the next three tries. He could hold the dice longer than any
man within the San Juan memory, which, in view of the fact that
craps is to San Juan what bridge is to Boston, is saying a great deal.
Ambrose was simply a demon with the bones, and he was big enough to
get away with it.

True, there had been difficulties.

One evening at the Social Club Ambrose held the dice for a straight
sixteen passes. He and five other courtiers of fortune were bounding
the ivories off the cushion of a billiard table, to the end that the
contest be one of chance and not of science. In the midst of
Ambrose's stentorian protests that the baby needed footwear, one