an turned down a
side street, hoping for fewer witnesses to his ignominy. The surfeited
beast waddled before him, panting with spleen and the labour of
motion.

Suddenly the dog stopped. A tall, brown, long-coated, wide-brimmed man
stood like a Colossus blocking the sidewalk and declaring:

"Well, I'm a son of a gun!"

"Jim Berry!" breathed the dogman, with exclamation points in his
voice.

"Sam Telfair," cried Wide-Brim again, "you ding-basted old
willy-walloo, give us your hoof!"

Their hands clasped in the brief, tight greeting of the West that is
death to the hand-shake microbe.

"You old fat rascal!" continued Wide-Brim, with a wrinkled brown
smile; "it's been five years since I seen you. I been in this town a
week, but you can't find nobody in such a place. Well, you dinged old
married man, how are they coming?"

Something mushy and heavily soft like raised dough leaned against
Jim's leg and chewed his trousers with a yeasty growl.

"Get to work," said Jim, "and explain this yard-wide hydrophobia
yearling you've throwed your lasso over. Are you the pound-master of
this burg? Do you call that a dog or what?"

"I need a drink," said the dogman, dejected at the reminder of his old
dog of the sea. "Come on."

Hard by was a cafe. 'Tis ever so in the big city.

They sat at a table, and the bloated monster yelped and scrambled at
the end of his leash to get at the cafe cat.

"Whiskey," said Jim to the waiter.

"Make it two," said the dogman.

"You're fatter," said Jim, "and you look subjugated. I don't know
about the East agreeing with you. All the boys asked me to hunt you up
when I started. Sandy King, he went to the Klondike. Watson Burrel, he
married the oldest Peters girl. I made some money buying beeves, and
I bought a lot of wild land up on the Little Powder. Going to fence
next fall. Bill Rawlins, he's gone to farming. You remember Bill, of
course--he was courting Marcella--excuse me, Sam--I mean the lady you
married, while she was teaching school at Prairie View. But you was
the lucky man. How is Missis Telfair?"

"S-h-h-h!" said the dogman, signalling the waiter; "give it a name."

"Whiskey," said Jim.

"Make it two," said the dogman.

"She's well," he continued, after his chaser. "She refused to live
anywhere but in New York, where she came from. We live in a flat.
Every evening at six I take that dog out for a walk. It's Marcella's
pet. There never were two animals on earth, Jim, that