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red-faced steam fitter. As to the Orlando Social Club, its quarters were gutted and its members were scattered. The steam fitter, who was sitting outside on a three-legged stool, taking the sun, mentioned the burned-out quarters when Fields approached.
"You the insurance adjuster?" he said sourly.
"Why, no, I can't honestly say that I am," Fields replied.
The man evidently failed to hear him, or paid no heed, for he went on, "Well, that second story up there, that's quite a mess, now, ain't it?"
Fields, looking up and seeing the scorch marks on the outside, murmured sympathetically.
"You been shinning around amongst the neighbors?" asked the fitter, with a keen look.
Fields stared blankly, and he continued, "There's been some talk that I fired it. I may be dumb, but I got ears."
Fields was about to congratulate him on a clever ruse when the man said, "They lie, that's how! There's slander laws, and so they'll find. I wasn't nowhere near. I was out on a boiler job — man blowed a sleeve valve and scalded two stokers two mile north of Cheaptown. So that's that, and you can investigate all you please, and be damned to you!"
Fields had been on the point of asking to see his old apartment, but in view of the steam fitter's vehemence he changed his mind and made off down the road, at a fairly brisk rate. Later on, he said the incident had cheered him up. "I finally felt at home," he explained.
He visited the stable where he had reaped the golden harvest of the benefit. The place had changed hands and nobody knew where the former owner had gone. The new man, a lugubrious beanpole, was apathetic toward Fields' reminiscence about the benefit, interrupting continually with complaints that a client named Hoskins had "lathered up" the establishment's best mare.
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