Of late years many of the Fust Famblies of San Juan have migrated northward to the teeming negro districts of Harlem, but enough of the old stock remains to lend the settlement its time-honoured touch of gloom.  Occasionally, too, it still makes its way to the public notice by sanguinary affrays and race riots.  San Juan Hill is a geographical, racial, and sociological fact, and will remain so until the day when safety razors become a universal institution.

San Juan is a community in itself.  It has its churches, its clubs, its theatres, its stores, and—­sighs of relief from the police—­it used to have its saloons.  It is a cosmopolitan community, too—­as cosmopolitan as it can be and still retain its Senegambian motif.

Negroes from Haiti, Jamaica, Salvador, Cuba; from Morocco and Senegal; blue-black negroes from the Pacific; ebony negroes from the South; brown, tan, yellow, and buff negroes from everywhere inhabit San Juan.  Every language from Arabic to Spanish is spoken by these—­the cosmopolites of cosmopolitan San Juan.

Pussonally, Mr. Ambrose de Vere Travis spoke only English.  Because he hailed from Galveston, Tex., he spoke it with a Gulf intonation at once liquid, rich, and musical.  He stood six feet five on his bare soles, so his voice was somewhat reminiscent of the Vatican organ.

Ambrose was twenty-four years old.  Our story finds him a New Yorker of three years’ standing, all of which he had spent as a dweller on San Juan Hill.  Originally the giant Mr. Travis had served as furnace tender in the subterraneous portions of the Swalecliffe Arms apartments, that turreted edifice in the Eighties that frowns across at the Palisades from Riverside Drive.  But his size and the size of his smile had won for Ambrose the coveted and uniformed position of door-man, a post at which he served with considerable success and the incidental tips.

The recently wealthy Mr. Braumbauer, for instance, really felt that he was somebody, when Ambrose opened the door of his car and bowed him under the portcullis of Swalecliffe.  And y’understand me, a feller’s willing he should pay a little something for service once in a while.  And so, one way and another, Ambrose managed to eke from his job a great deal more than he drew on pay day.

But Mr. Travis’s source of income did not stop there—­far from it.  He had brought from Galveston a genius for rolling sevens—­or, if he missed seven the first roll, he could generally make his point within the next three tries.  He could hold the dice longer than any man within the San Juan memory, which, in view of the fact that craps is to San Juan what bridge is to Boston, is saying a great deal.  Ambrose was simply a demon with the bones, and he was big enough to get away with it.

True, there had been difficulties.

One evening at the Social Club Ambrose held the dice for a straight sixteen passes.  He and five other courtiers of fortune were bounding the ivories off the cushion of a billiard table, to the end that the contest be one of chance and not of science.  In the midst of Ambrose’s stentorian protests that the baby needed footwear, one of the losers forgot his breeding to the extent of claiming that Ambrose had introduced a loaded die.  As he seconded his claims with a razor, the game met a temporary lull.