n streams that trickled
from its pockets. First making sure that he was in a well-screened
covert of the woods he set about exploring all his pockets. The coat
pockets were comparatively easy, now that he had got used to using two
hands where one had always served, but it cost him a lot of twisting of
his body and some pain to his mistreated wrist bones to bring forth the
contents of his trousers' pockets. The chain kinked time and again as he
groped with the undermost hand for the openings; his dumpy, pudgy form
writhed grotesquely. But finally he finished. The search produced four
cigars somewhat crumpled and frayed; some matches in a gun-metal case, a
silver cigar cutter, two five-dollar bills, a handful of silver chicken
feed, the leather case of the eyeglasses, a couple of quill toothpicks,
a gold watch with a dangling fob, a notebook and some papers. Mr. Trimm
ranged these things in a neat row upon a log, like a watchmaker setting
out his kit, and took swift inventory of them. Some he eliminated from
his design, stowing them back in the pockets easiest to reach. He kept
for present employment the match safe, the cigar cutter and the watch.

This place where he had halted would suit his present purpose well, he
decided. It was where an uprooted tree, fallen across an incurving bank,
made a snug little recess that was closed in on three sides. Spreading
the newspaper on the turf to save his knees from soiling, he knelt and
set to his task. For the time he felt neither hunger nor thirst. He had
found out during his earlier experiments that the nails of his little
fingers, which were trimmed to a point, could invade the keyholes in the
little steel warts on the backs of his wrists and touch the locks. The
mechanism had even twitched a little bit under the tickle of the nail
ends. So, having already smashed the gun-metal match safe under his
heel, Mr. Trimm selected a slender-pointed bit from among its fragments
and got to work, the left hand drawn up under the right, the fingers of
the right busy with the lock of the left, the chain tightening and
slackening with subdued clinking sounds at each movement.

Mr. Trimm didn't know much about picking a lock. He had got his money by
a higher form of burglary that did not require a knowledge of lock
picking. Nor as a boy had he been one to play at mechanics. He had let
other boys make the toy fluttermills and the wooden traps and the like,
and then he had traded for them. He