Even so, a great light was beginning to percolate to my innermost
consciousness. A grave doubt pestered me through our days of camping there
in the autumnal wilderness. When we had emerged from the woods and had
reached Montreal on the homeward trip I enticed my friend upon a
penny-in-the-slot weighing machine in the Montreal station and I observed
what he weighed; and then when he stepped aside I unostentatiously weighed
myself, and in the box score credited myself with a profound shock; also
with an error, which should have been entered up a long time before that.

Approximately, we were of the same height and in bone structure not
greatly unlike. I had figured that daily tramping after game should have
taken a few folds of superfluous flesh off my frame, and so, no doubt, it
had done. Yet I had pulled the spindle around the face of the dial to a
point which recorded for me a total of sixteen pounds and odd ounces more
than his penny had registered for him.

If he was fat, unmistakably and conclusively fat and he was--what then was
I? In Troy weight--Troy where the hay scales come from--the answer was
written. I was fat as fat, or else the machine had lied. And as between me
and that machine I could pick the liar at the first pick.




CHAPTER V

_On Acquiring Some Snappy Pores_


That night on the sleeper a splendid resolution sprouted within me. Next