where he sat in his stocking feet trying to pluck “The Banks of the Wabash” out of a small zither. Four years he has practised this tune without arriving near enough to cast the longest trout line to the water’s edge. On the dresser lay a blued-steel Colt’s forty-five and a tight roll of tens and twenties large enough around to belong to the spring rattlesnake-story class. A chambermaid with a room-cleaning air fluttered nearby in the hall, unable to enter or to flee, scandalized by the stocking feet, aghast at the Colt’s, yet powerless, with her metropolitan instincts, to remove herself beyond the magic influence of the yellow-hued roll.
I sat on his trunk while Ferguson Pogue talked. No one could be franker or more candid in his conversation. Beside his expression the cry of Henry James for lacteal nourishment at the age of one month would have seemed like a Chaldean cryptogram. He told me stories of his profession with pride, for he considered it an art. And I was curious enough to ask him whether he had known any women who followed it.
“Ladies?” said Pogue, with Western chivalry. “Well, not to any great extent. They don’t amount to much in special lines of graft, because they’re all so busy in general lines. What? Why, they have to. Who’s got the money in the world? The men. Did you ever know a man to give a woman a dollar without any consideration? A man will shell out his dust to another man free and easy and gratis. But if he drops
