Steve was angry.

You could see that from the way he strode up and down the platform of the covered railroad station, talking to himself in staccato explosives, like an automobile getting under way. Steve had lost his sample trunk; and a drummer without his trunk is as helpless as a lone fisherman without bait.

Outside, a snow-storm was working itself up into a blizzard; cuts level with the fences, short curves choked with drifts, flat stretches bare of a flake. Inside, a panting locomotive crawled ahead of two Pullmans and a baggage—a Special from Detroit to Kalamazoo, six hours late, loaded with comic-opera people, their baggage, properties—and Steve's lost trunk.

When the train pulled up opposite to where Steve stood, the engine looked like a snow-plough that had burrowed through a drift.

Steve moved down to the step of the first Pullman, his absorbing eye taking in the train, the fragments of the drift, and the noses of the chorus girls pressed flat against the frosted panes. The conductor was now on the platform, crunching a tissue telegram which the station-master had just handed him. He had stopped for orders and for a wider breathing space, where he could get out into the open and stretch his arms, and become personal and perhaps profane without wounding the feelings of his passengers.

Steve stepped up beside him and showed him an open telegram.

"Yes, your trunk's aboard all right," replied the conductor, "but I couldn't find it in a week. A lot of scenery and ladders and truck all piled in. I am sorry, but I wouldn't——"

"What you 'wouldn't,' my sweet Aleck, don't interest me," exploded Steve. "You get a couple of porters and go through that stuff and find my trunk, or I'll wire the main office that——"

"See here, young feller. Don't get gay. Hit that gourd of yours another crack and maybe you'll knock some sense into it. We're six hours late, ain't we? We got three hours to make Kalamazoo in, ain't we? This show's got to get there on time, or there'll be H to pay and no pitch hot. Now go outside and stand in a door somewheres and let the wind blow through you. I'll wire you in the morning, or you can take the 5.40 and pick your trunk up at Kalamazoo.—Let her go, Johnny"—this to the engine-driver. "All aboard!"

Steve jerked a cigar from his waistcoat pocket, cut off the end, and said, with a bite-in-two-ten-penny-nail expression about his lips:

"Steve, you're 'it.' I'll git that trunk at Kalamazoo."

Then he crossed the platform, made his way to the street entrance, and stepped into the omnibus of the only hotel in the town.

When the swinging sign of the Two-dollar House, blurred in the whirl of the storm, hove in sight, Steve's face was still knotted in wrinkles. He had a customer in this town good for three hundred dozen table cutlery, and but for "this gang of cross-tie steppers," he said to himself, he would.... Here the hind heels of the 'bus hit the curb, cutting short Steve's anathema.

The drummer picked up his grip and made his way to the desk.

"What's the matter, Stevey?" asked Larry, the clerk. "You look sour."

"Sour? I am a green pickle, Larry, that's what I am—a green pickle. Been waiting five hours for my trunk in that oriental palm garden of yours you call a station. It was aboard a Special loaded with chorus girls and props. Conductor wouldn't dump it, and now it's gone on to Kalamazoo and——"

"Oh, but you'll get it all right. All you've got to do, Steve, is to——"

"Get it! Yes, when the daisies are blooming over us. I want it now, Larry. Whenever I run up against anything solid it's always one of these fly-by-nights. What do you think of going upstairs in the dark and hauling out a red silk hat and a pair of gilt slippers, instead of a sample card of carvers? Well, that's what a guy did for me last fall down at Logansport. Sent me two burial caskets full of chorus-girl props instead of my trunk. Oh, yes, I'll get it—get it in the neck. Here, send this grip to my room."

The clerk pursed his lips and looked over his key-rack. He knew that he had no room—none that would suit Stephen Dodd—had known it when he saw him entering the door, the snow covering his hat and shoulders, his grip in his hands.

"Going to stay all night with us, Stephen?" Larry asked.

"Sure! What do you think I'm here for? Blowing and snowing outside fit to beat the band. What do you want me to do—bunk in the station?"

"H'm, h'm," muttered the clerk, studying the key-rack and name-board as if they were plans of an enemy's country.

Steve looked up. When a clerk began to say "H'm," Steve knew something was wrong.

"Full?"

"Well, not exactly full, Steve, but—h'm—we've got the 'Joe Gridley Combination' with us overnight, and about everything——"

"Go on—go on—what'd I tell you? Up ag'in these fly-by-nights as usual!" blurted out Steve.

The clerk raised his hand deprecatingly.

"Sorry, old man. Put you on the top floor with some of the troupe—good rooms, of course, but not what I like to give you. Leading lady's got your room, and the manager's got the one you sometimes have over the extension. It'll only be for to-night. They're going away in the morning, and I——"

"Cut it out—cut it out—and forget it," interrupted Steve. "So am I going away in the morning. Got to take the 5.40 and hunt up that trunk. Can't do a thing without it. Only waltzed in here to get something to eat and a bed. Be back later. Put me anywhere. This week's hoodooed, and these show guys are doing it. You want a guardian, Stephen—a gentle, mild-eyed little guardian. That's what you want."

The clerk rang a gong that sounded like a fire-alarm and the porter came in on a run.

"Take Mr. Dodd's grip and show him up to Number 11."

On the way upstairs Steve's quick eye caught the flare of a play-bill tacked to one wall.

"What is it?" he asked of the porter, pointing to the poster—"an 'East Lynne' or a 'Mother's Curse'?"

"No—one o' them mix-ups, I guess. Song and dance stunts. Number 11, did Larry say? There ye are—key's in the lock." And the porter pushed open the door of the room with his foot, dropped Steve's bag on the pine table, turned up the gas—the twilight was coming on—asked if there was "anything more"—found there wasn't—not even a dime—and left Steve in possession.

"'Bout as big as a coffin, and as cold," grumbled Steve, looking around the room. "No steam-heat—one pillow and"—here he punched the bed—"one blanket, and thin at that—the bed hard as a—Well, if this don't take the cake! If this burg don't get a hotel soon I'll cut it out of my territory."

Steve washed his hands; wiped them on a 14x20 towel; hung it flat, that it might dry and be useful in the morning, gave his hair a slick with his comb, scooped up a dozen cigars from a paper box, stuffed them in his outside pocket, relocked his grip, and retraced his steps downstairs.

When he reached the play-bill again he stopped for particulars. Condensed and pruned of inflammatory adjectives, the gay-colored document conveyed the information that the "Joe Gridley Combination" would play for this one night, performance beginning at 8 P.M., sharp. Molly Martin and Jessie Hannibal would dance, Jerry Gobo, the clown, would dislocate the ribs of the audience by his mirth-provoking sallies, and Miss Pearl Rogers of International, etc., etc., would charm them by her up-to-date delineations of genteel society. Then followed a list of the lesser lights, including chorus girls, clog dancers, and acrobats.

The porter was now shaking the red-hot stove with a cast-iron crank the size and shape of a burglar's jimmy, the ashes falling on a square of zinc protecting the uncarpeted floor. Steve recognized the noise, and looking down over the hand-rail called out, pointing to the poster:

"How far's this shebang?"

"'Bout a block."

"That settles it," said Steve to himself in the only contented tone of voice he had used since he entered the hotel. "I'll take this in." And continuing on downstairs, he dropped into a chair, completing the circle around the dispenser of comfort.

The business of the hotel went on. Trains arrived and were met by the lumbering stage, the passengers landing in the snow on the sidewalk—some for supper, one or two for rooms.

Supper was announced by a tight-laced blonde in white muslin, all hips and shoulders, throwing open the dining-room and mounting guard at the entrance, her face illumined by that knock-a-chip-off-my-shoulder expression common to her class.

Instantly, and with a simultaneous scraping of chair legs, the segments of the circle around the stove flung themselves into the narrow passageway.

Soon the racks were spotted with hats, their owners being drawn up in fours around the several tables—Steve one of them—the waiter-ladies serving with a sweetness of smile and elegance of manner found nowhere outside of a royal court, accompanied by a dignity of pose made all the more distinguished by a certain inward scoop of the back and instantaneous outward bulge below the waist line seen only in wax figures flanking a cloak counter.

Steve had a steak, liver and bacon, apple pie, a cup of coffee, and a toothpick—all in ten minutes. Then he resumed his place by the stove, lit a cigar, and kept his eye on the clock.

Three hours later Steve was again in his chair by the stove. He had been to the show and had sat through two hours of the performance. If his expression had savored of vinegar over the loss of his sample trunks, it was now double-proof vitriol!

"Thought you was goin' to the show," grunted the porter between his jerks at the handle; he was again at the stove, the thermometer marking zero outside.

"Been. Regular frost; buncoed out of fifty cents! That show is the limit! A couple of skinny-legged girls doing a clog stunt; a bag of bones in a low-necked dress playing Mrs. Langtry; and a wall-eyed clown that looked like a grave-digger. Rotten—worst I ever saw!"

"Full house?"

"Full of empties. 'Bout fifty people, I guess, counting deadheads—and ME."

Steve accentuated this last word as if his fifty cents had been the only real income of the house.

The outer door now opened, letting in a section of the north pole and a cough.

Steve twisted around in his chair and recognized Jerry Gobo, the clown. His grease paint was gone, but his haggard features and the graveyard hack settled his identity.

Jerry loosened the collar of his frayed, almost threadbare coat, approached the stove slowly, and stretching out one blue, emaciated hand, warmed it for an instant at its open door—in an apologetic way—as if the warming of one hand was all that he was entitled to.

Steve absorbed him at a glance. He saw that his neck was thin, especially behind the ears, the cords of the throat showing; his cheeks sunken; the sad, kindly eyes peering out at him furtively from under bushy eyebrows, bright and glassy; his knees, too, seemed unsteady. As he stood warming his chilled fingers, his hand and arm extended toward the heat, his body drawn back, Steve got the impression of a boy reaching out for an apple, and ready to cut and run at the first alarm.

"Kind o' chilly," the clown ventured, in a voice that came from somewhere below his collar-button.

"Yes," said Steve gruffly. He didn't intend to start any conversation. He knew these fellows. One had done him out of eleven dollars in a ten-cent game up at Logansport the winter before. That particular galoot didn't have a cough, but he would have had if he could have doubled his winnings by it.

Jerry, rebuffed by Steve's curt reply, brought up the other hand, toasted it for an instant at the kindly blaze, rubbed the two sets of bony knuckles together, and remarking—this time to himself—that he "guessed he'd turn in," walked slowly to the foot of the stairs and began ascending the long flight, his progress up one wall and half around the next marked by his fingers sliding along the hand-rail. Steve noticed that the bunched knuckles stopped at the first landing (it was all that he could see from where he sat), and after a spell of coughing slid slowly on around the court.

The drummer bit off the end of a fresh cigar; scraped a match on the under side of his chair seat; lit the domestic, and said with his first puff of smoke, his mind still on the emaciated form of the clown:

"Kindlin' wood for a new crematory."

Again the outer door swung open.

This time the Walking Lady entered, accompanied by the Business Agent. She wore a long brown cloak that came to her feet and a stringy fur tippet, her head and face covered by a hat concealed in a thick blue veil. This last she unwound inside the hall, and seeing Steve monopolizing the stove, began the ascent of the stairs, one step at a time, as if she was tired out.

Steve turned his face away. The bag of bones looked worse than ever. "'Bout fifty in the shade, I should think," he said to himself. "Ought to be taking in washing and ironing." Meantime Mathews, the Business Agent, was occupied with the clerk—Larry had presented him with a bill. The rates, the agent pleaded, were to be a dollar-sixty. Larry insisted on two dollars. Steve pricked up his ears; this interested him. If Larry wanted any backing as to the price he was within call. This information he conveyed to Larry by lifting his chin and slowly closing his left eye.

The outer door continued its vibrations with the rapidity of its green-baize namesake leading from the dining-room to the kitchen, ushering in some member of the troupe with every swing, including an elderly woman who had played the Duchess in the first act and a fishwife in the second; some young men with their hats over their noses, and four or five chorus girls. The men looked around for the index hand showing the location of the bar, and the girls, after a fit of giggling, began the ascent of the stairs to their rooms. Steve noticed that two of them continued on to the third floor, where Jerry Gobo, the clown, had gone, and where he himself was to sleep. One of the girls looked down at him as she turned the corner of the stairs and nudged her companion—all of which was lost on the drummer. They had probably recognized him in the audience.

Some young men ... and four or five chorus girls.

Nothing, however, in their present make-up could have recalled them to Steve's memory. Molly Martin had exchanged her green silk tights and gauze wings for a red flannel shirt-waist, a black leather belt, blue skirt, and cat-skin jacket. And Jessie Hannibal had shed her frou-frou frills and was buttoned to her red ears in a long gray ulster that reached down to her active little feet, now muffled in a pair of galoshes.

The dispute over the bill at an end, the Business Agent fished up a roll from one pocket and a handful of silver and copper coins from the other, counted out the exact amount, waited until the clerk marked a cross against his room number, calling him at seven o'clock A.M., tucked the receipt in his inside pocket, and began the weary ascent.

Steve shook himself free from the chair. This was about his hour. Rising to his legs, he elongated one side of his round body with his pudgy arm, and then the other, yawned sleepily, tipped his hat farther over his eyebrows, called to Larry to be sure and put him down for the 5.40, and mounted the stairs to his room. If he had had any doubts as to the fraudulent character of the whole "shooting match," his chance inspection of the caste had removed them.

On entering his room Steve made several discoveries, no one of which relieved his gloom or sweetened the acidity of his mind.

First, that the temperature was so far below that of a Pullman that the water-pitcher was skimmed with ice and the towel frozen as stiff as a dried codfish. Second, that Jerry, the clown, occupied the room to the right, and the two coryphÉes the room to the left. Third, that the partitions were thin as paper, or, as Steve expressed it, "thin enough to hear a feller change his mind."

With the turning-off of the gas and the tucking of Steve's fat round face and head under the single blanket and quilt, the sheet gripped about his chin, there came a harsh, rasping cough from the room on his right. Jerry had opened. Steve ducked his head and covered his ears. The clown would stop in a minute, and then Mr. Dodd would drop off to sleep.

Another sound now struck his ear—a woman's voice this time, with a note of sympathy in it. Steve raised his head and listened.

"Say, Jess, ain't that awful? I knew Jerry'd get it on that long jump we made. I ain't heard him cough like that since we left T'ronto."

"Oh, dreadful! And, Molly, he don't say a word 'bout how sick he is. Billy had to help him off with his— Oh, just hear Jerry!"

The talk ceased and Steve snuggled his head again. He wasn't interested in Jerry, or Molly, or Jessie. What he wanted was six hours' sleep, a call at 4.45, and his sample trunk.

Another paroxysm of coughing resounded through the partition, and again Steve freed his ear.

"Jerry ain't got but one little girl left, and she's only five years old. She's up to the Sacred Heart in Montreal. He sends her money every week—he told me so. He showed me her picture oncet. Say! give me some of the cover; it's awful cold, ain't it?"

Steve heard a rustling and tumbling of the bedclothes as the girls nestled the closer. Molly's voice now broke the short silence.

"Say, Jess, I'm dreadful worried 'bout Jerry. I bet he ain't got no more cover 'n we have. He's right next to us, and 'tain't no warmer where he is than it is here. I'd think he'd tear himself all to pieces with that cough. I hope nothin' 'll happen to him. He ain't like Mathews. Nobody ever heard a cross word out of Jerry, and he'd cut his heart out for ye and——"

Steve covered his head again and shut his eyes. Through the coarse cotton sheet he caught, as he dozed off to sleep (Jerry's cough had now become a familiar sound, and therefore no longer an incentive to insomnia), additional details of Jerry's life, fortunes and misfortunes, in such broken sentences as—

"She never cared for him, so Billy told me. She went off with—Why, sure! didn't you know he got burnt out?—lost his trick ponies when he was with Forepaugh— It'll be awful if we have to leave him behind, and—I'm goin' to see a doctor just as soon as we get to——"

Here Steve fell into oblivion.

Ten minutes later he was startled by the opening of his door. In the dim glow of the hall gas-jet showing through the crack and the transom, his eyes caught the outline of a girl in her night-dress, her hair in two braids down her neck. She was stepping noiselessly and approaching his bed. In her hand she carried a quilt. Bending above him—Steve lying in the shadow—she spread the covering gently over his body, tucked the end softly about his throat, and as gently tiptoed out of the room. Then there came a voice from the other side of the partition:

"He ain't coughin' any more—he's asleep. I got it over him. Now get all your clo'es, Molly, and pile 'em on top. We can get along."

Steve lay still. His first impulse was to cry out that they had made a mistake—that Jerry was next door; his next was to slip into Jerry's room and pile the quilt on him. Then he checked himself—the first would alarm and mortify the girls, and the second would be like robbing them of the credit of their generous act. Jerry might wake and the girls would hear, and explanations follow and all the pleasure of their sacrifice be spoiled. No, he'd hand it back to the girls, and say he was much obliged but he didn't need it. Again he stopped—this time with a sudden pull-up. Going into a chorus girl's room, under any pretence whatever, in a hotel at night! No, sir-ee, Bob! Not for Stephen! He had been there; none of that in his!

All this time the quilt was choking him—his breath getting shorter every minute, as if he was being slowly smothered. A peculiar hotness began to creep over the skin of his throat and a small lump to rise near his Adam's apple, followed by a slight moistening of the eyes—all new symptoms to Steve, new since his boyhood.

Suddenly there flashed into his mind the picture of a low-roofed garret room, sheltering a trundle-bed tucked away under the slant of the shingles. In the dim light where he lay he caught the square of the small window, the gaunt limbs of the butternut beyond, and could hear, as he listened, the creak of its branches bending in the storm. All about were old-fashioned things—a bureau with brass handles; a spinning-wheel; ropes of onions; a shelf of apples; an old saddle; and a rocking-chair with one arm gone and the bottom half out. A soft tread was heard upon the stairs, a white figure stole in, and a warm hand nestling close to his cheeks tucked the border of a quilt under his chin. Then came a voice. "I thought you might be cold, son."

With a bound Steve sprang from the bed.

For an instant he sat on the edge of the hard mattress, his eyes on the floor, as if in deep thought.

"Those two girls lying there freezing, and all to get that feller warm!" he muttered. "You're a dog, Stephen Dodd—that's what you are—a yellow dog!"

Reaching out noiselessly for his shoes and socks, he drew them toward him, slipped in his feet, dragged on his trousers and shirt, threw his coat around his shoulders—he was beginning to shiver now—opened the door of his room cautiously, letting in more of the glow of the gas-jet, and stole down the corridor to the staircase. Here he looked into a black gulf. The only lights were the one by the clerk's desk and the glow of the stove. Quickening his steps, he descended the stairs to the lower floor. The porter would be up, he said to himself, or the night watchman, or perhaps the clerk; somebody, anyway, would be around. He looked over the counter, expecting to find Larry in his chair; passed out to the porter's room and studied the trunks and boot-stand; peered behind the screen, and finding no one, made a tour of the floor, opening and shutting doors. No one was awake.

Then a new thought struck him. This came with a thumping of one fist in the palm of the other hand, his face breaking out into a satisfied smile at his discovery. He remounted the stairs—the first flight two steps at a time, the second flight one step at a time, the last few levels on his toes. If he had intended to burglarize one of the rooms he could not have been more careful about making a noise. Entering his own apartment, he picked up the quilt the girls had spread over him, folded it carefully and laid it on the floor. Then he stripped off his own blanket and quilt and placed them beside it. These two packages he tucked under his arm, and with the tread of a cat crept down the corridor to the stairway. Once there, he wheeled and with both heels striking the bare floor came tramping toward the girls' room.

Next came a rap like a five-o'clock call—low, so as not to wake the more fortunate in the adjoining rooms, but sure and positive. Steve knew how it sounded.

"Who's there?" cried Molly in a voice that showed that Steve's knuckles had brought her to consciousness. "'Tain't time to get up, is it?"

"No, I'm the night watchman; some of the folks is complaining of the cold and saying there warn't covering enough, and so I thought you ladies might want some more bedclothes," and Steve squeezed the quilt in through the crack of the door.

"Oh, thank you," began Molly; "we were sort o'——"

"Don't mention it," answered Steve, closing the door tight and shutting off any further remark.

The heels were lifted now, and Steve crept to Jerry's door on his toes. For an instant he listened intently until he caught the sound of the labored breathing of the sleeping man, opened the door gently, laid the blanket and quilt he had taken from his own bed over Jerry's emaciated shoulders, and crept out again, dodging into his own room with the same sort of relief in his heart that a sneak thief feels after a successful raid. Here he finished dressing.

Catching up his grip, he moved back his door, peered out to be sure he was not being watched, and tiptoed along the corridor and so on to the floor below.

An hour later the porter, aroused by his alarm clock to get ready for the 5.40, found Steve by the stove. He had dragged up another chair and lay stretched out on the two, his head lost in the upturned collar of his coat, his slouch hat pulled down over his eyes.

"Why, I thought you'd turned in," yawned the porter, dumping a shovelful of coal into the stove.

"Yes, I did, but I couldn't sleep." There was a note in Steve's voice that made the porter raise his eyes.

"Ain't sick, are ye?"

"No—kind o' nervous—get that way sometimes. Not in your way, am I?"

A MEDAL OF HONOR