“Think of raising a real thirst only to drown it with spring water!” he said.  But he got the pop corn and he ate it all.  If he hadn’t had any luncheon he hadn’t had much breakfast.  The queer part was—­he was a gentleman; his clothes were the right sort, but he had on patent leather shoes in all that snow and an automobile cap.

I put away the glasses while he ate.  Pretty soon he looked up and the drawn lines were gone.  He wasn’t like Mr. Dick, but he was the same type, only taller and heavier built.

“And so it isn’t a hotel,” he remarked.  “Well, I’m sorry.  The caravansary in the village is not to my liking, and I had thought of engaging a suite up here.  My secretary usually attends to these things, but—­don’t take away all the glasses, Heb—­I beg your pardon—­but the thirst is coming.”

He filled the glass himself and then he came up and stood in front of me, with the glass held up in the air.

“To the best woman I have met in many days,” he said, not mocking but serious.  “I was about to lie down and let the little birds cover me with leaves.”  Then he glanced at the empty dish and smiled.  “To buttered pop-corn!  Long may it wave!” he said, and emptied the glass.

Well, I found a couple of apples in my pantry and brought them out, and after he ate them he told me what had happened to him.  He had been a little of everything since he left college he was about twenty-five had crossed the Atlantic in a catboat and gone with somebody or other into some part of Africa—­they got lost and had to eat each other or lizards, or something like that—­and then he went to the Philippines, and got stuck there and had to sell books to get home.  He had a little money, “enough for a grub-stake,” he said, and all his folks were dead.  Then a college friend of his wrote a rural play called Sweet Peas—­“Great title, don’t you think?” he asked—­and he put up all the money.  It would have been a hit, he said, but the kid in the play—­the one that unites its parents in the last act just before he dies of tuberculosis—­the kid took the mumps and looked as if, instead of fading away, he was going to blow up.  Everybody was so afraid of him that they let him die alone for three nights in the middle of the stage.  Then the leading woman took the mumps, and the sheriff took everything else.

“You city folks seem to know so much,” I said, “and yet you bring a country play to the country!  Why don’t you bring out a play with women in low-necked gowns, and champagne suppers, and a scandal or two?  They packed Pike’s Opera-House three years ago with a play called Why Women Sin.”

Well, of course, the thing failed, and he lost every dollar he’d put into it, which was all he had, including what he had in his pockets.

“They seized my trunks,” he explained, “and I sold my fur-lined overcoat for eight dollars, which took one of the girls back home.  It’s hard for the women.  A fellow can always get some sort of a job—­I was coming up here to see if they needed an extra clerk or a waiter, or chauffeur, or anything that meant a roof and something to eat—­but I suppose they don’t need a jack-of-all-trades.”