e you kowtowing to the big worse ones,
and we get to thinking _we_ can come in under the wires easy winners,
too. However, let me tell you something while I'm in the humor to gas.
It's this: _sooner or later everybody gets theirs_. My sort and
Inglesby's sort, we all get ours. Duck and twist and turn and sidestep
all we want, at the end it's right there waiting for us, with a loaded
billy up its sleeve: _Ours!_ Some fine day when we're looking the
other way, thinking we've even got it on the annual turnout of the
cops up Broadway for class, why, Ours gets up easy on its hind legs,
spits on its mitt, and hands us exactly what's coming to us, biff! and
we wake up sitting on our necks in the middle of day-before-yesterday
and year-after-next. I got mine. If I was you I wouldn't be too
cock-sure that kid don't give Inglesby his, some of these days, good
and plenty."

"Maybe so," said I, cautiously.

"Gee, that'd be fly-time for all the good guys in this tank, wouldn't
it?" he grinned. "Sure! I can see 'em now, patting the bump on their
beams where they think the brain-patch sprouts, and handing out hunks
of con to the Lord about his being right on his old-time job of
swatting sinners in their dinners. Yet they'll all of them go right on
leading themselves up to be trimmed by the very next holdup that's got
the nerve to do them! Friend, believe a goat when he tells you that
you stillwater-and-greenpasture sheep are some bag of nuts!"

"Thank you," said I, with due meekness.

"Keep the change," said he, unabashed. "I wasn't meaning _you_,
anyhow. I've got more manners, I hope, than to do such. And, parson,
you don't need to have cold feet about young Mayne. If you ask me,
_I'd_ bet the limit on him. Why, I think so much of that boy that if
he was a rooster I'd put the gaffs and my last dollar on him, and back
him to whip everything in feathers clean up to baldheaded eagles.
Believe me, he'd do it!" he finished, with enthusiasm.

Bewildered by a mental picture of a Laurence with ruffled
neck-feathers and steel spurs, I hurriedly changed the subject to the
saner and safer one of our own immediate affairs.

"Yep, ten orders in to-day's mail and seven in yesterday's; and good
orders for the wasp-moths, single or together, and that house in New
York wants steady supplies from now on. And here's a fancy shop wants
a dozen trays, like that last one I finished. We're looking up," said
he, complacently.

The winter that f