Jackson spoke with such authority that the little fellow stepped back, the smile that was on his lips faded suddenly, and he joined the pickpockets. The little fellow was a grubber; he could throw his body instantly into innumerable hideous shapes of deformity; he had not the courage to be a thief, was afraid to sleep in a barn, and so had become a beggar.

As Mason bade Gibbs good night and went out he was laughing, and Archie had not often seen him laugh. On the way down the street he told stories of Jimmy's abilities as a beggar, and they all laughed, all save Jackson, who was gloomy and morose and walked along shrouded in a kind of gloom that impressed Archie powerfully.

And now new days dawned for Archie--days of association with Mason, Jackson, Keenan and Mandell. The Market Place gang had no standing among professional criminals, though it had furnished recruits, and now Archie became a recruit, and soon approved himself. It was not long until he could speak their language; he called a safe a "peter" and nitroglycerin "soup," a freight-train was a "John O'Brien"; he spoke of a man convicted as a "fall man", conveying thus subtly a sense of vicarious sacrifice; he called policemen "bulls", and jails "pogeys"; the penitentiary where all these men had been was the "stir", and the little packages of buttered bread and pie that were handed out to them from kitchen doors were "lumps". And he learned the distinctions between the classes of men who defy society and its laws; he knew what gay cats were, and guns and dips, lifters, moll-buzzers, hoisters, tools, scratchers, stalls, damper-getters, housemen, gopher-men, peter-men, lush-touchers, super-twisters, penny-weighters, and so forth. And after that he was seen at home but seldom; his absences grew long and mysterious.

XVIII

Elizabeth did not go often to the Country Club, and almost never for any pleasure she herself could find; now and then she went with her father, in order to lure him out of doors; but to-day she had come with Dick, who wanted some fitting destination for his new touring car. She was finding on a deserted end of the veranda a relief from the summer heat that for a week had smothered the city. A breeze was blowing off the river, and she lay back languidly in her wicker chair and let it play upon her brow. In her lap lay an open book, but she was not reading it nor meditating on it; she held it in readiness to ward off interruption; her reputation as a reader of books, while it made her formidable to many and gave her an unpopularity that was more and more grieving her mother, had its compensations--people would not often intrude upon a book. She looked off across the river. On its smooth surface tiny sail-boats were moving; on the opposite bank there was the picturesque windmill of a farm-house, white against the bright green. The slender young oak trees were rustling in the wind; the links were dotted with players in white, and the distant flags and fluttering guidons that marked hidden putting greens. Then suddenly Marriott was before her. He had come in from the links, and he stood now bareheaded, glowing from his exercise, folding his arms on the veranda rail. His forearms were blazing red from their first burning of the season, and his nose was burned red, giving him a merry look that made Elizabeth smile.

"My! but you're burned!" she exclaimed.

"Am I?" said Marriott, pleased.

"Yes--like a mower," she added, remembering some men working in a field that had fled past them as they came out in the automobile. She remembered she had fancied the men burned brown as golfers, and she had some half-formed notion of a sentence she might turn at the expense of a certain literary school that viewed life thus upside down. She might have gone on then and talked it over with Marriott, but her brain was too tired; she could moralize just then no further than to say:

"You don't deserve to be burned as a mower--your work isn't as hard."

"No," said Marriott, "it isn't work at all--it's exercise; it's a substitute for the work I should be doing." A look of disgust came to his face.