No, certainly he should not spend money on high-priced hotels until he had things moving again.  There would be no more money coming in until the plane was repaired—­darn it, there was always that big hump in the trail; always something in the way, something to postpone his grasping at success!  Now he’d have to sleep in some hot, frowsy little room for about four bits, instead of luxuriating in a suite as he would like to do.

They reached the little suburban village and the street car.  Johnny had an impulse to stop there for the night and leave the city to a more propitious time, but Bland was already licking lips in anticipation of the joys of Spring Street, and made such vehement protest that Johnny yielded.  If he stayed in Inglewood Bland would go on without him, and Johnny did not want that, for Bland might not come back.  And whatever his mental and moral shortcomings, Bland was somebody whom Johnny knew; if not a friend, yet a familiar personality in a city filled with strangers.

Perhaps it was the night that veiled the city’s big human workaday side and showed only the cold, blue-white residence streets palm-shaded and remote, and the inhospitable closed stores and shops of the business district, that gave Johnny a lost, lonesome feeling of utter homelessness.  For the matter of that, Johnny could not remember when he was not homeless—­but he did not often feel depressed by the fact.  He followed Bland down the car steps at Fifth Street, walked with him past a delicatessen store whence apartment dwellers were trickling, their hands full of small paper bags and packages.  They looked pale and sickly and harassed to Johnny, to whom desert-browned faces were a standard by which he measured all others.

A barber shop reminded him of grime and untrimmed hair, and he halted so abruptly that Bland forged several paces ahead before he missed him.  He turned back grumbling, just as Johnny went in at the door, and followed grudgingly.  He had wanted a glass of beer first of all, but yielded the point and took his shave resignedly.

Johnny spent a full hour in that shop, and when he emerged he was worth the second glance he got from the girls hurrying homeward.  Tubbed, shaven, trimmed, a fresh shine on boots that still showed the marks of spurs worn from dawn to dark when those boots were new, he towered above Bland Halliday, who looked dingier and more down-at-heel than ever by contrast.  It would take more than shaven jowls to make a gentleman of Bland.

They went on to Broadway, crossed it precariously, and reached the pavement by what Johnny considered a hair’s-breadth of safety as a big car slid past his heels.  They passed lighted plate-glass windows wherein silver and gold gleamed richly.  Then Bland unwittingly pushed Johnny Jewel from the edge of obscurity into the bright light of notoriety again.

Bland said, “I know a joint where we can git a good room for fifty cents—­and no questions asked, bo.”