watching one another, and it was pretty sickly
business for two of us and hard to act out, I can tell
you. About night we landed at one of them little
Missouri towns high up toward Iowa, and had supper
at the tavern, and got a room upstairs with a cot and a
double bed in it, but I dumped my bag under a deal
table in the dark hall while we was moving along it to
bed, single file, me last, and the landlord in the lead
with a tallow candle. We had up a lot of whisky, and
went to playing high-low-jack for dimes, and as soon
as the whisky begun to take hold of Bud we stopped
drinking, but we didn’t let him stop. We loaded him
till he fell out of his chair and laid there snoring.
“We was ready for business now. I said we better
pull our boots off, and his’n too, and not make any
noise, then we could pull him and haul him around and
ransack him without any trouble. So we done it. I
set my boots and Bud’s side by side, where they’d be
handy. Then we stripped him and searched his seams
and his pockets and his socks and the inside of his
boots, and everything, and searched his bundle. Never
found any di’monds. We found the screwdriver, and
Hal says, ‘What do you reckon he wanted with that?’
I said I didn’t know; but when he wasn’t looking I
hooked it. At last Hal he looked beat and discour-
aged, and said we’d got to give it up. That was what
I was waiting for. I says:
“‘There’s one place we hain’t searched.’
“‘What place is that?’ he says.
“‘His stomach.’
“‘By gracious, I never thought of that! NOW we’re
on the homestretch, to a dead moral certainty. How’ll
we manage?’
“‘Well,’ I says, ‘just stay by him till I turn out and
hunt up a drug store, and I reckon I’ll fetch something
that’ll make them di’monds tired of the company
they’re keeping.’
“He said that’s the ticket, and with him looking
straight at me I slid myself into Bud’s boots instead of
my own, and he never noticed. They was just a shade
large for me, but that was considerable better than be-
ing too small. I got my bag as I went a-groping
through the hall, and in about a minute I was out the
back way and stretching up the river road at a five-mile
gait.
“And not feeling so very bad, neither — walking on
di’monds don’t have no such effect. When I had gone
fifteen minutes I says to myself, there’s more’n a mile
behind me, and everything quiet. Another five minutes
and I says there’s considerable more land behind me
now, and there’s a man back there that’s begun to
wonder what’s the trouble. Another five and I says to
myself he’s getting real uneasy — he’s walking the floor
now. Another five, and I says to myself, there’s two
mile and a half behind me, and he’s AWFUL uneasy — be-
ginning to cuss, I reckon. Pretty soon I says to my-
self, forty minutes gone — he KNOWS there’s something
up! Fifty minutes — the truth’s a-busting on him
now! he is reckoning I found the di’monds whilst we
was searching, and shoved them in my pocket and never
let on — yes, and he’s starting out to hunt for me.
He’ll hunt for new tracks in the dust, and they’ll as
likely send him down the river as up.
“Just then I see a man coming down on a mule, and
before I thought I jumped into the bush. It was
stupid! When he got abreast he stopped and waited
a little for me to come out; then he rode on again.
But I didn’t feel gay any more. I says to myself I’ve
botched my chances by that; I surely have, if he meets
up with Hal Clayton.
“Well, about three in the morning I fetched Elex-
andria and see this stern-wheeler laying there, and was
very glad, because I felt perfectly safe, now, you know.
It was just daybreak. I went aboard and got this state-