about the chin by a violently red stubble of several days' growth. With
so much of himself showing; the new-comer paused on the threshold in
apparent doubt as to whether he would be permitted to enter, or ordered
to withdraw.

"Come in, Joe, and shut the door!" said Gilmore.

At his bidding the shoulders and trunk, and lastly the legs of a
slouching shambling man of forty-eight or fifty entered the room.

Closing the door Joe Montgomery slipped off one patched and ragged cloth
mitten and removed his battered cap.

"Well, what the devil do you want?" demanded Gilmore sharply.

Joe, shuffling and shambling, edged toward the grate.

"Boss, I want to drop a word with you!" he said in a husky voice. His
glance did not quite meet Gilmore's, but the moment Gilmore shifted his
gaze, that moment Joe's small, bright blue eyes sought the gambler's.

Gilmore and Joe Montgomery were distantly related, and while the latter
never presumed on the score of this remote connection, the gambler
himself tacitly admitted it by the help he now and then extended him,
for Montgomery's means of subsistence were at the best precarious. If he
had been called on to do so, he would have described himself as a
handy-man, since he lived by the doing of odd jobs. He cleaned carpets
in the spring; he cut lawns in the summer; in the fall he carried coal
into the cellars of Mount Hope, and in the winter he shoveled the snow
off Mount Hope's pavements; and at all times and in all seasons,