“But how could you, Leith,” I cried, the picture of the consumptive lad strong before me, “how could you treat him so barbarously?”

Leith laughed dryly.  “My dear fellow, how often must I explain to you your confusions?  Orthodox sentiment and stereotyped emotion master you.  And then your temperament!  You are really incapable of rational judgments.  Cerberus?  Pshaw!  A flash expiring, a mote of fading sparkle, a dim-pulsing and dying organism—­pouf! a snap of the fingers, a puff of breath, what would you?  A pawn in the game of life.  Not even a problem.  There is no problem in a stillborn babe, nor in a dead child.  They never arrived.  Nor did Cerberus.  Now for a really pretty problem—­”

“But the local color?” I prodded him.

“That’s right,” he replied.  “Keep me in the running.  Well, I took my handful of copy paper down to the railroad yards (for local color), dangled my legs from a side-door Pullman, which is another name for a box-car, and ran off the stuff.  Of course I made it clever and brilliant and all that, with my little unanswerable slings at the state and my social paradoxes, and withal made it concrete enough to dissatisfy the average citizen.

“From the tramp standpoint, the constabulary of the township was particularly rotten, and I proceeded to open the eyes of the good people.  It is a proposition, mathematically demonstrable, that it costs the community more to arrest, convict, and confine its tramps in jail, than to send them as guests, for like periods of time, to the best hotel.  And this I developed, giving the facts and figures, the constable fees and the mileage, and the court and jail expenses.  Oh, it was convincing, and it was true; and I did it in a lightly humorous fashion which fetched the laugh and left the sting.  The main objection to the system, I contended, was the defraudment and robbery of the tramp.  The good money which the community paid out for him should enable him to riot in luxury instead of rotting in dungeons.  I even drew the figures so fine as to permit him not only to live in the best hotel but to smoke two twenty-five-cent cigars and indulge in a ten-cent shine each day, and still not cost the taxpayers so much as they were accustomed to pay for his conviction and jail entertainment.  And, as subsequent events proved, it made the taxpayers wince.

“One of the constables I drew to the life; nor did I forget a certain Sol Glenhart, as rotten a police judge as was to be found between the seas.  And this I say out of a vast experience.  While he was notorious in local trampdom, his civic sins were not only not unknown but a crying reproach to the townspeople.  Of course I refrained from mentioning name or habitat, drawing the picture in an impersonal, composite sort of way, which none the less blinded no one to the faithfulness of the local color.

“Naturally, myself a tramp, the tenor of the article was a protest against the maltreatment of the tramp.  Cutting the taxpayers to the pits of their purses threw them open to sentiment, and then in I tossed the sentiment, lumps and chunks of it.  Trust me, it was excellently done, and the rhetoric—­say!  Just listen to the tail of my peroration: