be too
full to run. Either way,' I says, 'it's pinch, and,' I says, 'we'd
better face it on a full stomach, than an empty one.'

"'But they'll have the goods on us,' he says.

"'Son,' I says, 'if they'll only hang back a little we'll have the goods
in us. They won't have no trouble proving the corpus delicatessen,' I
says, '--not if they bring a stomach pump along. Bar that window,' I
says, 'and let joy be unconfined.'

"So he fastens her up from the inside, and while we hears the aroused
and infuriated populace surrounding the place and getting ready to begin
to think about making up their minds to advance en massy, I pulls down
the front shades and strikes a match and lights up a coal-oil lamp and
reaches round for something suitable to take the first raw edge off my
appetite--such as a couple of hams.

"Then right off I sees where we has made a fatal mistake, and my heart
dies within me and I jest plum collapses and folds up inside of myself
like a concertina. And that explains," he concluded, "why you ain't seen
me for going on the last eighteen months."

"Did they give you eighteen months for breaking into the delicatessen
shop?" I asked.

Mr. Doolan fetched a long, deep, mournful sigh.

"No," he said simply, "they gave us eighteen months for breaking into
the undertaker's next door."

CHAPTER X

A TALE OF WET DAYS

In the days before the hydrant-headed specter of Prohibition reared its
head in the Sunny South I had this tale from a true Kentucky gentleman.
As he gave it to me, so, reader, do I give it to you:

"Yes, suh, to this good day Colonel Bud Crittenden ain't never fergot
that time he made the mistake about Stony Buggs and the Bear Grass
County man. It learnt him a lesson, though. It learnt him that the
deceivingest pusson on earth, when it comes to seeping up licker, is a
little feller with his eyes fur apart and one of these here excitable
Adamses' apples.

"Speaking about it afterwards to a passel of boys over in the swopping
ring, he said the experience, while dissapinting at the time, was worth
a right smart to him subsequent. Previous to that time he said he was in
error regarding the amount of licker a little man, with them
peculiarities of features I just mentioned, could chamber at one
setting.

"Said he knowed some of the derndest, keenest gunfighters in the state
was little men and he'd always acknowledged that spare-built,
narrer-waisted men made the best hands drivin