possessed.

This was not the first time he had been broke. On the contrary,
during his younger days he had more than once found himself in
that condition and had looked upon it as an exciting experience,
as a not unpleasant form of adventure. To be strapped in a mining
camp, for instance, was no more than a mild embarrassment. But to
find oneself thirty-eight years old, friendless and without funds
in a city the size of Dallas--well, that was more than an
adventure, and it afforded a sort of excitement that he believed
he could very well do without. Dallas was no open-handed frontier
town; it was a small New York, where life is settled, where men
are suspicious, and where fortunes are slow in the making. He
wondered now if hard, fast living had robbed him of the punch to
make a new beginning; he wondered, too, if the vague plans at the
back of his mind had anything to them or if they were entirely
impracticable. Here was opportunity, definite, concrete, and
spelled with a capital O, here was a deliberate invitation to
avail himself of a short cut out of his embarrassment. A mere
scratch of a pen and he would have money enough to move on to some
other Dallas, and there gain the start he needed--enough, at
least, so that he could tip his waiter and pay cash for his
Coronas. Business men are too gullible, any how; it would be a
good lesson to Roswell and Haviland. Why not--?

Calvin Gray started, he recoiled slightly, the abstracted stare
was wiped from his face, for an officer in uniform had brushed
past him and entered the bank. That damned khaki again! Those
service stripes! They were forever obtruding themselves, it
seemed. Was there no place where one could escape the hateful