ts, a gloomy, grouchy individual, who threatened to become an enemy,
was made into a good friend. He became even genial, his looks were
kindly, and our voices mellowed together as we talked water-front and
oyster-bed gossip.

"Small beer for me, Johnny," I said, when the others had ordered
schooners. Yes, and I said it like the accustomed drinker, carelessly,
casually, as a sort of spontaneous thought that had just occurred to me.
Looking back, I am confident that the only one there who guessed I was a
tyro at bar-drinking was Johnny Heinhold.

"Where'd he get it?" I overheard Spider confidentially ask Johnny.

"Oh, he's been sousin' here with Nelson all afternoon," was Johnny's
answer.

I never let on that I'd heard, but PROUD? Aye, even the barkeeper was
giving me a recommendation as a man. "HE'S BEEN SOUSIN' HERE WITH NELSON
ALL AFTERNOON." Magic words! The accolade delivered by a barkeeper with a
beer glass!

I remembered that French Frank had treated Johnny the day I bought the
Razzle Dazzle. The glasses were filled and we were ready to drink.
"Have something yourself, Johnny," I said, with an air of having intended
to say it all the time, but of having been a trifle remiss because of the
interesting conversation I had been holding with Clam and Pat.

Johnny looked at me with quick sharpness, divining, I am positive, the
strides I was making in my education, and poured himself whisky from his
private bottle. This hit me for a moment on my thrifty side. He had
taken a ten-cent drink when the rest of us were drinking five-cent
drinks! But the hurt was only for a moment. I dismissed it as ignoble,
remembered my concept, and did not give myself away.

"You'd better put me down in the book for this," I said, when we had
finished the drink. And I had the satisfaction of seeing a fresh page
devoted to my name and a charge pencilled for a round of drinks amounting
to thirty cents. And I glimpsed, as through a golden haze, a future
wherein that page would be much charged, and crossed off, and charged
again.

I treated a second time around, and then, to my amazement, Johnny
redeemed himself in that matter of the ten-cent drink. He treated us
around from behind the bar, and I decided that he had arithmetically
evened things up handsomely.

"Let's go around to the St. Louis House," Spider suggested when we got
outside. Pat, who had been shovelling coal all day, had gone home, and
Clam had gone upon the Re