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known Willie all my life. So I didn’t catch on right away that he was out to shake hands. I must have looked at his outstretched hand inquiringly and then given him a blank look, and he just showed me his dead pan–it was just another pan, at first glance anyway–and kept on holding his hand out. Then I came to, and not to be undone in courtesy of the old school, I hitched my chair back from the table and almost stood all the way up, and groped for his hand. It was a pretty good-sized hand. When you first took it you figured it was on the soft side, and the palm a little too moist–which is something, however, you don’t hold against a man in certain latitudes–then you discovered it has a solid substructure. It was like the hand of a farm boy who has not too recently given up the plow for a job in the crossroad store. Willie’s hand gave mine three decorous pump-handle motions, and he said, “Glad to meetcha, Mr. Burden,” like something he had memorized, and then, I could have sworn, he gave me a wink. Then looking into that dead pan, I wasn’t sure. About twelve years later, at a time when the problem of Willie’s personality more imperiously occupied my rare hours of speculation, I asked him, “Boss, do you remember the time we first got acquainted in the back room of Slade’s joint?”
    He said he did, which wasn’t remarkable, for he was like the circus elephant, he never forgot anything, the fellow who gave him the peanut or the fellow who put snuff in his trunk.
    “You remember when we shook hands?” I asked him.
    “Yeah,” he said “Well, Boss,” I demanded, “did you or didn’t you wink at me?”
    “Boy–” he said and toyed with his glass of scotch and soda and dug the heel of one of his unpolished, thirty-dollar, chastely designed bench-made shoes into the best bed-spread the St. Regis Hotel could afford. “Boy,” he said, and smiled at me paternally over his glass, “that is a mystery.”
    “Don’t you remember?” I said.
    “Sure,” he said, “I remember.”
    “Well,” I demanded “Suppose I just had something in my eye?” he said.
    “Well, damn it, you just had something in your eye ten.”
    “Suppose I didn’t have anything in my eye?”
    “Then maybe you winked because you figured you and me had some views in common about the tone of the gathering.”
    “Maybe,” he said. “It ain’t any secret that my old schoolmate Alex was a heel. And it ain’t any secret that Tiny Duffy is as sebaceous a fat-ass as ever made the spring groan in a swivel chair.”
    “He is an s. o. b.,” I affirmed.
    “He is,” the Boss agreed cheerfully, “but he is a useful citizen. If you know what to do with him.”
    “Yeah,” I said, “and I suppose you think you know what to do with him. You made him Lieutenant Governor.” (For that was in the Boss’s last term when Tiny was his understudy.)
    “Sure,” the Boss nodded, “somebody’s got to be Lieutenant Governor.”
    “Yeah,” I said, “Tiny Duffy.”
    “Sure,” he said, “Tiny Duffy. The beauty about Tiny is that nobody can trust him and you know it. You get somebody somebody can trust maybe, and you got to sit up nights worrying whether you are the somebody. You get Tiny, and you can get a night’s sleep. All you got to do is keep the albumen scared out of his urine.”
    “Boss, did you wink at me that time back at Slade’s?”
    “Boy,” he said, “if I was to tell you, then you wouldn’t have anything to think about.”
    So I never did know.
    But I did see Willie shake hands that morning with Tiny Duffy and fail to wink at him. He just stood there in front of Mr. Duffy, and when the great man, not rising, finally extended his hand with the reserved air of the Pope offering his toe to the kiss of a Campbellite, Willie took it and gave it the three pumps which seemed to be regulation up in Mason City.
    Alex sat down at the table, and Willie just stood there, as though waiting to be invited, till Alex kicked the