"Both," I admitted.
He shot me a quick look.
"I can put you onto a dead sure thing, if you're game for it. Let's hunt us a warm place and chew it over."
The place was the back room of an all-night saloon in the slum quarter beyond the bridge. It was warm, stiflingly warm and close, after the outdoor blast and chill, and it reeked like a sty. Kellow kicked out a chair for me and drew up one for himself on the opposite side of the small round card-table over which a single gas-jet hissed and sizzled, lighting the tiny box of a place with a sickly yellow glare.
"What'll it be?" he asked, when the waiter came in.
"A piece of bread and meat from the lunch counter, if you don't mind," I said; and then, in an apology for which I instantly despised myself: "Liquor doesn't agree with me lately; it—it would gag me."
Kellow ordered whiskey for himself, and after the waiter was gone he stared at me contemptuously.
"So it's come to that, has it?" he derided. "You're so damned hungry you're afraid to put a drop of bug-juice under your belt. You're a fool, Weyburn. I know what you've been doing, just as well as if you'd told me the whole story. Also, I'll believe now what I didn't believe while we were in 'stir'; you were pinched for something you didn't do."
"Well?" I said, neither affirming nor denying. The free lunch had come and I was falling upon it like a famished wolf. I hadn't a penny in my pockets, and the bread and meat stood for breakfast, dinner and supper combined.
Kellow swallowed his whiskey at a gulp and stood the empty glass bottom upward on the table.