"In case I might get lost in this strange city," I said to my companion as
I jumped out, "I'd like to know what people call you when they're in a
good humor."

He grinned down at me. "Frosty Miller would hit me, all right," he
informed me, and drove off somewhere down the street. So I went in and
asked for a room, and got it.

This sounds sordid, I know, but the truth must be told, though the
artistic sense be shocked. Barred from the track as I was, sent out to
grass in disgrace while the little old world kept moving without me to
help push, my mind passed up all the things I might naturally be supposed
to dwell upon and stuck to three little no-account grievances that I hate
to tell about now. They look small, for a fact, now that they're away out
of sight, almost, in the past; but they were quite big enough at the
time to give me a bad hour or two. The biggest one was the state of my
appetite; next, and not more than a nose behind, was the state of my
pockets; and the last was, had Rankin packed the gray tweed trousers that
I had a liking for, or had he not? I tried to remember whether I had
spoken to him about them, and I sat down on the edge of the bed in that
little box of a room, took my head between my fists, and called Rankin
several names he sometimes deserved and had frequently heard from my lips.
I'd have given a good deal to have Rankin at my elbow just then.

They were not in the suit-case--or, if they were, I had not run across
them. Rankin had a way of stowing things away so that even he had to do
some tall searching, and he had another way of filling up my suit-cases
with truck I'd no immediate use for. I yanked the case toward me, unlocked
it, and turned it out on the bed, just to prove Rankin's general