“‘Hey!  Injun!’ I yells out to High Jack.  ’We’ve got a board-bill due in town, and you’re leaving me without a cent.  Brace up and cut out the Neapolitan fisher-maiden, and let’s go back home.’

“But on the two goes; without looking once back until, as you might say, the forest swallowed ’em up.  And I never saw or heard of High Jack Snakefeeder from that day to this.  I don’t know if the Cherokees came from the Aspics; but if they did, one of ’em went back.

“All I could do was to hustle back to that Boca place and panhandle Major Bing.  He detached himself from enough of his winnings to buy me a ticket home.  And I’m back again on the job at Chubb’s, sir, and I’m going to hold it steady.  Come round, and you’ll find the steaks as good as ever.”

I wondered what Hunky Magee thought about his own story; so I asked him if he had any theories about reincarnation and transmogrification and such mysteries as he had touched upon.

“Nothing like that,” said Hunky, positively.  “What ailed High Jack was too much booze and education.  They’ll do an Indian up every time.”

“But what about Miss Blue Feather?” I persisted.

“Say,” said Hunky, with a grin, “that little lady that stole High Jack certainly did give me a jar when I first took a look at her, but it was only for a minute.  You remember I told you High Jack said that Miss Florence Blue Feather disappeared from home about a year ago?  Well, where she landed four days later was in as neat a five-room flat on East Twenty-third Street as you ever walked sideways through—­and she’s been Mrs. Magee ever since.”

THE MOMENT OF VICTORY

Ben Granger is a war veteran aged twenty-nine—­which should enable you to guess the war.  He is also principal merchant and postmaster of Cadiz, a little town over which the breezes from the Gulf of Mexico perpetually blow.

Ben helped to hurl the Don from his stronghold in the Greater Antilles; and then, hiking across half the world, he marched as a corporal-usher up and down the blazing tropic aisles of the open-air college in which the Filipino was schooled.  Now, with his bayonet beaten into a cheese-slicer, he rallies his corporal’s guard of cronies in the shade of his well-whittled porch, instead of in the matted jungles of Mindanao.  Always have his interest and choice been for deeds rather than for words; but the consideration and digestion of motives is not beyond him, as this story, which is his, will attest.

“What is it,” he asked me one moonlit eve, as we sat among his boxes and barrels, “that generally makes men go through dangers, and fire, and trouble, and starvation, and battle, and such recourses?  What does a man do it for?  Why does he try to outdo his fellow-humans, and be braver and stronger and more daring and showy than even his best friends are?  What’s his game?  What does he expect to get out of it?  He don’t do it just for the fresh air and exercise.  What would you say, now, Bill, that an ordinary man expects, generally speaking, for his efforts along the line of ambition and extraordinary hustling in the marketplaces, forums, shooting-galleries, lyceums, battle-fields, links, cinder-paths, and arenas of the civilized and vice versa places of the world?”