I offers to pay his gambling debt, aint I telling him to his face he aint got enough sense to bet on horses? And when I tells him where the money come from I’m gonter pay it with, aint I proving it?”

“I still dont see where the insult to you comes in,” I said.
“He might take it,” Ned said.

Then the day came at last. Everbe sent for me and I walked across town to the little back-street almost doll-size house that Boon was buying by paying Grandfather fifty cents every Saturday. She had a nurse and she should have been in bed. But she was sitting up, waiting for me, in a wrapper; she even walked across to the cradle and stood with her hand on my shoulder while we looked at it.

“Well?” she said. “What do you think?”
I didn’t think anything. It was just another baby, already as ugly as Boon even if it would have to wait twenty years to be as big. I said so. “What are you going to call it?”
“Not it,” she said. “Him. Cant you guess?”

“What?” I said.

“His name is Lucius Priest Hogganbeck,” she said.

THE END