Ronicky Doone glared at him in positive alarm.  “Well,” he said, “that’s different.”

“It sure is.  I guess we’ve come on a wild-goose chase, Ronicky, hunting for a girl named Smith that lives on the bank of the East River!” He laughed bitterly.

“How come you know so much about New York?” asked Ronicky, eager to turn the subject of conversation until he could think of something to cheer his friend.

“Books,” said Bill Gregg.

After that there was a long lull in the conversation.  That night neither of them slept long, for every rattle and sway of the train was telling them that they were rocking along toward an impossible task.  Even the cheer of Ronicky had broken down the next morning, and, though breakfast in the diner restored some of his confidence, he was not the man of the day before.

“Bill,” he confided, on the way back to their seats from the diner, “there must be something wrong with me.  What is it?”

“I dunno,” said Bill.  “Why?”

“People been looking at me.”

“Ain’t they got a right to do that?”

“Sure they have, in a way.  But, when they don’t seem to see you when you see them, and when they begin looking at you out of the corner of their eyes the minute you turn away, why then it seems to me that they’re laughing at you, Bill.”

“What they got to laugh about?  I’d punch a gent in the face that laughed at me!”

But Ronicky fell into a philosophical brooding.  “It can’t be done, Bill.  You can punch a gent for cussing you, or stepping on your foot, or crowding you, or sneering at you, or talking behind your back, or for a thousand things.  But back here in a crowd you can’t fight a gent for laughing at you.  Laughing is outside the law most anywheres, Bill.  It’s the one thing you can’t answer back except with more laughing.  Even a dog gets sort of sick inside when you laugh at him, and a man is a pile worse.  He wants to kill the gent that’s laughing, and he wants to kill himself for being laughed at.  Well, Bill, that’s a good deal stronger than the way they been laughing at me, but they done enough to make me think a bit.  They been looking at three things—­these here spats, the red rim of my handkerchief sticking out of my pocket, and that soft gray hat, when I got it on.”

“Derned if I see anything wrong with your outfit.  Didn’t they tell you that that was the style back East, to have spats like that on?”

“Sure,” said Ronicky, “but maybe they didn’t know, or maybe they go with some, but not with me.  Maybe I’m kind of too brown and outdoors looking to fit with spats and handkerchiefs like this.”

“Ronicky,” said Bill Gregg in admiration, “maybe you ain’t read a pile, but you figure things out just like a book.”

Their conversation was cut short by the appearance of a drift of houses, and then more and more.  From the elevated line on which they ran presently they could look down on block after block of roofs packed close together, or big business structures, as they reached the uptown business sections, and finally Ronicky gasped, as they plunged into utter darkness that roared past the window.