Page:Vance--Terence O'Rourke.djvu/17

 which O'Rourke sat down again, and cursed bitterly, if fluently.

"The divvle!" he murmured in disgust. "Now, if I hadn't been so enthusiastic for paying me rent—"

He produced his fortune and contemplated it with a disgusted glare: five silver francs and a centime or two, glittering bright in the rays of the declining sun.

"Why, sure," he mused, "'tis not enough to buy the dinner for a little bird—and 'tis meself that's no small bird!"

Now, how may a man by taking thought increase five francs one or two or three hundred fold?

At nightfall he concluded to give it up, the problem looming unsolvable. There seemed to be no answer to it, and O'Rourke was considering himself a much abused person with no friend to call his own the wide world 'round, barring—

"Paz!" he cried suddenly. "And why did I not think of Paz before, will ye be telling me?"

He sat silent for some time, wrapped in thought, as in a mantle.

"Likely am I to go hungry, the night," he admitted at length, ruefully; "but I'll dine in style or not at all."

Incontinently, he began to bustle about the narrow room—how he had grown to hate its mean confines of late!—preparing to go out.

He started by shaving his lean cheeks, indelibly sun-burned, very closely; then he wriggled into the one immaculate shirt his wardrobe boasted, brushed with care and donned his evening clothes and an inverness; and completed his adornment with gloves and shoes of the sleekest—both of which he had been hoarding all the winter against just such an emergency.