the ninth o' next June you show
up at number forty-nine, Rue de Champaign, Paris, at two fifteen P.
M.--sharp. Here's a million francs to pay expenses. Don't be a
tight-wad--the's plenty more." A franc is worth five dollars, but he
didn't give a durn for 'em. That was HIS style.

He'd come to town an' buy a tenement house 'at wouldn't rent, because
it was haunted; an' he'd tear it all down except the rooms 'at had been
most popular to commit murder in. Then next day he'd run up a swell
mansion around these rooms--big an' gorgeous, like the Capitol at
Cheyenne, with full-grown trees from all over the world, standin' in
the front yard. Then he 'd give a party to all the substantial citizens
who had once used those rooms to commit murders in, an' he'd bring 'em
face to face with the ones they thought they had murdered--an' it was
comical to see 'em fallin' around in faints; but Monte, he'd pretend
'at he hadn't noticed anything unusual, an' he'd get 'em a glass of
wine an' make 'em face the torture, till it gives a feller a cold
sweat, just to read about it.

You might think that a man runnin' for congress in this country has a
hard time sinkin' his reputation; but the way 'at Monte Cristo mined
around in a feller's past was enough to scare a cat out of a cellar.
They don't run things over in France like they do here; they make
Counts an' Markusses an' Bankers out of the bad men, an' slap the
innocent ones into dungeons to keep 'em from gettin' spoilt. But this
didn't suit Monte for a minute; so when he gets the gang all settin' up
in front of him like a herd o' tenpins he sez, "Let her go!" an' you
ought to have seen 'em drop.

He don't do none o' the dirty work himself--no more prisons for him. He
just goes around like a Sunday-school director at Christmas time, while
his enemies turn to an' poison an' stab an' mutilate each other in a
way to turn a butcher pale; but his favorite plan is to make 'em go
insane an' have their hair turn white in a single night. That got to be
his private brand.

Well, Hammy read the book to us so natural that we all slept in one bed
for company; but it cheered us a heap, an' we begun to feel rich,
ourselves, an' talked about millions as easy an' natural as though we
each had little holler islands of our own. Miller was about my size, so
'at all his clothes fit me like the skin on a potato. Hammy was a
leetle too tall an' thin, and Locals, a foot or so short; but they
fished out a coup