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“Oh, well,” said “Bunco Harry,” raising his eyebrows, “I didn’t mean to butt in. You don’t have to tell. I thought you ought to tone down a little, so I tried to put you wise. Wish you success at your graft, whatever it is. Come and have a drink, anyhow.”

“I wouldn’t mind having a glass of lager beer,” acknowledged the other.

They went to a caf’e frequented by men with smooth faces and shifty eyes, and sat at their drinks.

“I’m glad I come across you, mister,” said Haylocks. “How’d you like to play a game or two of seven-up? I’ve got the keerds.”

He fished them out of Noah’s valise–a rare, inimitable deck, greasy with bacon suppers and grimy with the soil of cornfields.

“Bunco Harry” laughed loud and briefly.

“Not for me, sport,” he said, firmly. “I don’t go against that make- up of yours for a cent. But I still say you’ve overdone it. The Reubs haven’t dressed like that since ’79. I doubt if you could work Brooklyn for a key-winding watch with that layout.”

“Oh, you needn’t think I ain’t got the money,” boasted Haylocks. He drew forth a tightly rolled mass of bills as large as a teacup, and laid it on the table.

“Got that for my share of grandmother’s farm,” he announced. “There’s $950 in that roll. Thought I’d come to the city and look around for a likely business to go into.”

“Bunco Harry” took up the roll of money and looked at it with almost respect in his smiling eyes.

“I’ve seen worse,” he said, critically. “But you’ll never do it in them clothes. You want to get light tan shoes and a black suit and a straw hat with a colored band, and talk a good deal about Pittsburg and freight differentials, and drink sherry for breakfast in order to work off phony stuff like that.”

“What’s his line?” asked two or three shifty-eyed men of “Bunco Harry” after Haylocks had gathered up his impugned money and departed.

“The queer, I guess,” said Harry. “Or else he’s one of Jerome’s men. Or some guy with a new graft. He’s too much hayseed. Maybe that his–I wonder now–oh, no, it couldn’t have been real money.”

Haylocks wandered on. Thirst probably assailed him again, for he dived into a dark groggery on a side street and bought beer. At first sight of him their eyes brightened; but when his insistent and exaggerated rusticity became apparent their expressions changed to wary suspicion.

Haylocks swung his valise across the bar.

“Keep that a while for me, mister,” he said, chewing at the end of a virulent claybank cigar. “I’ll be back after I knock around a spell. And keep your eye on it, for there’s $950 inside of it, though maybe you wouldn’t think so to look at me.”

Somewhere outside a phonograph struck up a band piece, and Haylocks was off for it, his coat-tail buttons flopping in the middle of his back.

“Divvy, Mike,” said the men hanging upon the bar, winking openly at one another.

“Honest, now,” said the bartender, kicking the valise to one side. “You don’t think I’d fall to that, do you? Anybody can see he ain’t no jay. One of McAdoo’s come-on squad, I guess. He’s a shine if he made himself up. There ain’t no parts of the country now where they dress like that since they run rural free delivery to Providence, Rhode Island. If he’s got nine-fifty in that valise it’s a ninety-eight cent Waterbury that’s stopped at ten minutes to ten.”

When Haylocks had exhausted the resources of Mr. Edison to amuse he returned for his valise. And then down Broadway he gallivanted, culling the sights with his eager blue eyes. But still and evermore Broadway rejected him with curt glances and sardonic smiles. He was the oldest of the “gags” that the city must endure. He was so flagrantly impossible, so ultra rustic, so exaggerated beyond the most freakish products of the barnyard, the hayfield and the vaudeville stage, that he excited only weariness and suspicion. And the wisp of hay in his hair was so genuine, so fresh and redolent of the meadows, so clamorously rural that even a shellgame man would have put up his peas and folded his table at the sight of it.