The Claim Jumpers

In a fifth-story sitting room of a New York boarding house four youths were holding adiscussion. The sitting room was large and square, and in the wildest disorder, which was, however, sublimated into a certain system by an illuminated device to the effect that one should"Have a Place for Everything, and then there'll be one Place you won't have to look." Easels andartists' materials thrust back to the wall sufficiently advertised the art student, and perhapsexplained the untidiness. Two of the occupants of the room, curled up on elevated window ledges, were emitting cloudsof tobacco smoke and nursing their knees; the other two, naked to the waist, sat on a couple ofordinary bedroom mattresses deposited carefully in the vacant centre of the apartment. Theywere eager, alert-looking young men, well-muscled, curly of hair, and possessing in common anunabashed carriage of the head which, more plainly than any mere facial resemblance, provedthem brothers. They, too, were nursing their knees."He must be an unadorned ass," remarked one of the occupants of the window seats, in answerto some previous statement."He is not," categorically denied a youth of the mattresses. "My dear Hench, you make nodistinctions. I've been talking about the boy's people and his bringing up and the way he acts, whereupon you fly off on a tangent and coolly conclude things about the boy himself. It is notonly unkind, but stupid