y figuring on a
good two thousand dollars in it, having sized up the buyer pretty well.

I felt satisfied that my telegram would put some insomnia in
Ninety-sixth Street when the great work closed for the night at the
Fifth Avenue Hotel, and the protector of the household returned to rest
those tired wheels that had been whirring fast in his head since 2 P. M.,
short-belted to the Smith dynamo of fraud.

I didn't expect to do much sleeping myself, so I proceeded to divest and
relax under the sedative pull of my pipe. For about half an hour I
creaked the comfortable rocker, and pondered on that old subject of
fools and their money, and how it was that wise men like myself had so
little of it. The solitudes and soliloquies of life appealed to
me--especially with a nice bunch of fake crime hovering in the air
between me and, say, a few feet beneath my rocker. I was lolling in our
front parlor, probably not ten feet above the spot just vacated by the
latest victim, and the man who would swing or singe for the deed was
playing a soft nostrilian air two doors down the hall--but, no! The tune
stopped! The villain had turned 216 pounds over on a set of springs
which shiveringly reported the man-quake in their midst. A brief moment
of calm--just enough for a murderer to lick his chops and gather a
lulling sense of monotony from the contemplation of a fresh
wife-slaying, and he was off again with the sheriff after him for
exceeding the speed limit. His horn was clearing the track and the
vibrations blended in a romping continuity.

The deeper Jim got into his Bluebeard dreams, or his fairyland of love,
the deeper I got into my hobby, political economy, and to thinking of
the wide difference between us.

Somebody had to do a little thinking, for Fate was tying our affairs in
hard, wet knots, and the chances were we'd have to stay under the stream
of life's perplexities. Jim was so smooth in appearance (alas! but not
in tongue) he might slip out of a corner as easily as his fine manners
enabled him to progress in society. But I was no man for style. I could
cut no swath with women. The few times I had tried it, the scythe had
turned upon me, took me for an extra tough bunch of wet grass and stung
me badly. I could see that my chances there were poor. If Jim got out of
this murder business, as I believed he would soon, I intended to run the
flat alone, fill it full of books written by people who have advised the
country out of a