ick in the di'monds and screw on his plates again. He allowed we
would steal the bogus swag and wait all night for him to come up and get
drownded, and by George it's just what we done! I think it was powerful
smart."

"You bet your life it was!" says Tom, just full of admiration.

CHAPTER IV. THE THREE SLEEPERS

WELL, all day we went through the humbug of watching one another, and it
was pretty sickly business for two of us and hard to act out, I can tell
you. About night we landed at one of them little Missouri towns high up
toward Iowa, and had supper at the tavern, and got a room upstairs with
a cot and a double bed in it, but I dumped my bag under a deal table in
the dark hall while we was moving along it to bed, single file, me last,
and the landlord in the lead with a tallow candle. We had up a lot of
whisky, and went to playing high-low-jack for dimes, and as soon as the
whisky begun to take hold of Bud we stopped drinking, but we didn't let
him stop. We loaded him till he fell out of his chair and laid there
snoring.

"We was ready for business now. I said we better pull our boots off, and
his'n too, and not make any noise, then we could pull him and haul him
around and ransack him without any trouble. So we done it. I set my
boots and Bud's side by side, where they'd be handy. Then we stripped
him and searched his seams and his pockets and his socks and the inside
of his boots, and everything, and searched his bundle. Never found any
di'monds. We found the screwdriver, and Hal says, 'What do you reckon
he wanted with that?' I said I didn't know; but when he wasn't looking I
hooked it. At last Hal he looked beat and discouraged, and said we'd got
to give it up. That was what I was waiting for. I says:

"'There's one place we hain't searched.'

"'What place is that?' he says.

"'His stomach.'

"'By gracious, I never thought of that! NOW we're on the homestretch, to
a dead moral certainty. How'll we manage?'

"'Well,' I says, 'just stay by him till I turn out and hunt up a drug
store, and I reckon I'll fetch something that'll make them di'monds
tired of the company they're keeping.'

"He said that's the ticket, and with him looking straight at me I slid
myself into Bud's boots instead of my own, and he never noticed. They
was just a shade large for me, but that was considerable better than
being too small. I got my bag as I went a-groping through the hall, and
in about a minute I was out the b