long sentences. He was losing his cold feet, blossoming again in the atmosphere of Hank, for Hank was at once an individual and an atmosphere, an atmosphere wherein extraordinary ideas, seeming scarcely strange, could flourish like tropical plants in a green house.

At breakfast, George was his same old self again and as keen as yesterday about the Dutchman business.

“I didn’t tell you,” said the Rat Trap Inventor, “I’ve been cooking it up—but I’ve done another39 deal. Y’remember I said I’d want five thousand dollars to push the thing through? Well, now listen, you saw what I did with Tyrebuck, well I’ve done better with Barrett.”

39

“Which Barrett?”

“Joe.”

Instantly before George’s eyes arose the picture of Barrett’s Stores on Market Street in all their vastness, and Joe Barrett himself, dapper and debonair. Eccentric by nature, Barrett used his eccentricity as a means toward publicity. If he had possessed a wooden leg or a glass eye or a skeleton in his cupboard, he would without doubt have used them as a means of advertisement. It was the only thing he really cared for. His business was less to him than the advertising of it; heaven for J. B. existed only as a background for sky signs and if he could have printed “Barrett” on the moon in indelible ink, he would have done so, even at the risk of being skinned alive by all the poets.

“Yes?” said George.

“I met him last night at the Bay Club,” said Hank, “and the idea struck me. He’d provision us better and cheaper than anyone else seeing that I know him so well. He’s a sport, and I just let him into the thing, told him the whole business and how I’d got the Wear Jack from Tyrebuck for nothing and how you were joining in. Then I opened my batteries about the provisions. I want enough for six men for three months, to say40 nothing of gasoline and oil and some new bunk bedding. He offered to do it for two thousand dollars. I offered a thousand, to take him down, and he forked out a dollar. ‘I’ll toss you two thousand or nothing,’ he says. Luck seemed running so strong I took him, and lost.”

40

“Oh, you lost.”

“One minute. ‘Best out of three,’ said he, and tosses again. I won; then he tosses again and I won. You see he’d got it in his head, somehow, that we were tossing best out of 

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