furnished offices
in Chicago. After he had taken in a hundred thousand or so dollars one
of these fussy purchasers that are always making trouble (I've had
'em actually try gold watches I've sold 'em with acid) took a cheap
excursion down to the land where it is always just before supper to
look at his lot and see if it didn't need a new paling or two on the
fence, and market a few lemons in time for the Christmas present
trade. He hires a surveyor to find his lot for him. They run the line
out and find the flourishing town of Paradise Hollow, so advertised,
to be about 40 rods and 16 poles S., 27 degrees E. of the middle of
Lake Okeechobee. This man's lot was under thirty-six feet of water,
and, besides, had been preempted so long by the alligators and gars
that his title looked fishy.

"Naturally, the man goes back to Chicago and makes it as hot for
Alfred E. Ricks as the morning after a prediction of snow by the
weather bureau. Ricks defied the allegation, but he couldn't deny
the alligators. One morning the papers came out with a column about
it, and Ricks come out by the fire-escape. It seems the alleged
authorities had beat him to the safe-deposit box where he kept his
winnings, and Ricks has to westward ho! with only feetwear and a dozen
15-and-a-half English pokes in his shopping bag. He happened to have
some mileage left in his book, and that took him as far as the town
in the wilderness where he was spilled out on me and Bill Bassett as
Elijah III. with not a raven in sight for any of us.

"Then this Alfred E. Ricks lets out a squeak that he is hungry, too,
and denies the hypothesis that he is good for the value, let alone the
price, of a meal. And so, there was the three of us, representing, if
we had a mind to draw syllogisms and parabolas, labor and trade and
capital. Now, when trade has no capital there isn't a dicker to be
made. And when capital has no money there's a stagnation in steak and
onions. That put it up to the man with the jimmy.

"'Brother bushrangers,' says Bill Bassett, 'never yet, in trouble,
did I desert a pal. Hard by, in yon wood, I seem to see unfurnished
lodgings. Let us go there and wait till dark.'

"There was an old, deserted cabin in the grove, and we three took
possession of it. After dark Bill Bassett tells us to wait, and goes
out for half an hour. He comes back with a armful of bread and
spareribs and pies.

"'Panhandled 'em at a farmhouse on Washita Avenue,' says he. 'E