The following morning found him on the front
seat of the Stenton stage, sharing with the driver
not his customary cigarettes but more portentous
cigars from an ample pocketful. "Greenstream's
dead," he pronounced; "I'm going after some
life."

Late that night he leaned across the sloppy bar
of an inferior saloon in Stenton, and, with an uncertain
wave of his hand, arrested the barkeeper's attention.
"I'm here," he articulated thickly, "to see
life, understand! And I can see it too -- money's
power." The other regarded him with a brief,
mechanical interest, a platitude shot suavely from
hard, tobacco-stained lips.

Later still: "I'm here to see life," he told a
woman with a chalky countenance, a countenance
without any expression of the consciousness of the
sound of his voice, a vague form lost in loose draperies.
"Life," he emphasized above the continuous,
macabre rattle of a piano.

In a breathless, hot dawn pouring redly into the
grey city street, he swayed like a pendulum on the
steaming pavement. His side was smeared, caked,
with unnamable filth, refuse; a tremulous hand
gripped feverishly the shoulder of a policeman who
had roused him from a constrained stupor in a casual
angle. "I wan' to see life," he mumbled dully, "I
got power... money." He fumbled through his

[[101]]

p100 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p101w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p102

v?