saying, Jowett," he said. "It's a penitentiary job, if it can be proved.
Are you sure you got it right?"

Jowett had unusual shrewdness, some vanity and a humorous tongue. He was
a favourite in both towns, and had had the better of both in horse-
dealing a score of times.

That did not make him less popular. However, it was said he liked low
company, and it was true that though he had "money in the bank," and
owned a corner lot or so, he seemed to care little what his company was.
His most constant companion was Fabian Osterhaut, who was the common
property of both towns, doing a little of everything for a living, from
bill-posting to the solicitation of an insurance agent.

For any casual work connected with public functions Osterhaut was
indispensable, and he would serve as a doctor's assistant and help cut
off a leg, be the majordomo for a Sunday-school picnic, or arrange a
soiree at a meeting-house with equal impartiality. He had been known to
attend a temperance meeting and a wake in the same evening. Yet no one
ever questioned his bona fides, and if he had attended mass at Manitou in
the morning, joined a heathen dance in Tekewani's Reserve in the
afternoon, and listened to the oleaginous Rev. Reuben Tripple in the
evening, it would have been taken as a matter of course.

He was at times profane and impecunious, and he had been shifted from
one boarding-house to another till at last, having exhausted credit in
Lebanon, he had found a room in the house of old Madame Thibadeau in
Manitou. She had taken him in because, in years gone by, he had nursed
her only son through an attack of smallpox on the Siwash River, and
somehow Osterhaut had always paid his bills to her. He was curiously