And he had but one arm.

Yet was he cheerful. On his face, in mild degree, was depicted sensuous pleasure as he lethargically scratched his ribs with his one hand. He pawed over his food-scraps, debated, then drew a twelve-ounce druggist's bottle from his inside coat pocket. The bottle was full of a colorless liquid, the contemplation of which made his little eye burn brighter and quickened his movements. Picking up the tomato can, he arose, went down the short path to the river, and returned with the can filled with not-nice river water. In the condensed milk can he mixed one part of water with two parts of fluid from the bottle. This colorless fluid was druggist's alcohol, and as such is known in tramp-land as ›alki.‹

Slow footsteps, coming down the side of the railroad embankment, alarmed him ere he could drink. Placing the can carefully upon the ground between his legs, he covered it with his hat and waited anxiously whatever impended.

Out of the darkness emerged a man as filthy ragged as he. The newcomer, who might have been fifty, and might have been sixty, was grotesquely fat. He bulged everywhere. He was composed of bulges. His bulbous nose was the size and shape of a turnip. His eyelids bulged and his blue eyes bulged in competition with them. In many places the seams of his garments had parted across the bulges of body. His calves grew into his feet, for the broken elastic sides of his Congress gaiters were swelled full with the fat of him. One arm only he sported, from the shoulder of which was suspended a small and tattered bindle with the mud caked dry on the outer covering from the last place he had pitched his doss. He advanced with tentative caution, made sure of the harmlessness of the man beside the fire, and joined him.

»Hello, grandpa,« the newcomer greeted, then paused to stare at the other's flaring, sky-open nostril. »Say, Whiskers, how'd ye keep the night dew out of that nose o' yourn?«

Whiskers growled an incoherence deep in his throat and spat into the fire in token that he was not pleased by the question.

»For the love o' Mike,« the fat man chuckled, »if you got caught out in a rainstorm without an umbrella you'd sure drown, wouldn't you?«

»Can it, Fatty, can it,« Whiskers muttered wearily. »They ain't nothin' new in that line of chatter. Even the bulls hand it out to me.«

»But you can still drink, I hope.« Fatty at the same time mollified and invited, with his one hand deftly pulling the slip-knots that fastened his bindle.

From within the bindle he brought to light a twelve-ounce bottle of alki. Footsteps coming down the embankment alarmed him, and he hid the bottle under his hat on the ground between his legs.

But the next comer proved to be not merely one of their own ilk, but likewise to have only one arm. So forbidding of aspect was he that greetings consisted of no more than grunts. Huge-boned, tall, gaunt to cadaverousness, his face a dirty death's head, he was as repellant a nightmare of old age as ever Doré imagined. His toothless, thin-lipped mouth was a cruel and bitter slash under a great curved nose that almost met the chin and that was like a buzzard's beak. His one hand, lean and crooked, was a talon. The beady gray eyes, unblinking and unwavering, were bitter as death, as bleak as absolute zero and as merciless. His presence was a chill, and Whiskers and Fatty instinctively drew together for protection against the unguessed threat of him. Watching his chance, privily, Whiskers snuggled a chunk of rock several pounds in weight close to his hand if need for action should arise. Fatty duplicated the performance.

Then both sat licking their lips, guiltily embarrassed, while the unblinking eyes of the terrible one bored into them, now into one, now into another, and then down at the rock-chunks of their preparedness.

»Huh!« sneered the terrible one, with such dreadfulness of menace as to cause Whiskers and Fatty involuntarily to close their hands down on their cave-man's weapons.

»Huh!« the other repeated, reaching his one talon into his side coat pocket with swift definiteness. »A hell of a chance you two cheap bums 'd have with me.«

The talon emerged, clutching ready for action a six-pound iron quoit.

»We ain't lookin' for trouble, Slim,« Fatty quavered.

»Who in hell are you to call me ›Slim‹?« came the snarling answer.

»Me? I'm just Fatty, an' seein' 's I never seen you before –«

»An' I suppose that's Whiskers, there, with the gay an' festive lamp tangoing into his eyebrow an' the God-forgive-us nose joy-riding all over his mug?«

»It'll do, it'll do,« Whiskers muttered uncomfortably.