e sirupy articles, which have since
come into quite general use, are known, I believe, as all-day suckers.

When Judge Priest looked up again, Peep O'Day was outside the gate,
clumping down the uneven sidewalk of Clay Street with long strides of
his booted legs. Half a dozen small boys, who, it was evident, had
remained hidden during the ceremony of presentation, now mysteriously
appeared and were accompanying the departing donor, half trotting to
keep up with him.

CHAPTER IV

THE LUCK PIECE

Until now Trencher--to give him the name by which of all the names he
used he best was known--had kept his temper in hobbles, no matter what
or how great the provocation. As one whose mode of livelihood was trick
and device outside the law it had behooved him ever to restrain himself
from violent outbreaks, to school and curb and tame his natural
tendencies as a horsebreaker might gentle a spirited colt. A man who
held his disposition always under control could think faster than any
man who permitted his passions to jangle his nerves. Besides, he had the
class contempt of the high-grade confidence man--the same being the
aristocrat of the underworld--for the crude and violent and therefore
doubly dangerous codes of the stick-up, who is a highwayman; and the
prowler, who is a burglar; and the yegg, who is a safe blower of sorts.

Until now Trencher had held fast by the self-imposed rules of his
self-imposed discipline, and so doing had lived well and lived safe. It
was an unfortunate thing all round that this little rat of a Sonntag had
crossed him at an hour when he was profoundly irritated by the collapse
of their elaborately planned and expensive scheme to divest that
Cheyenne cattleman of his bank roll at the wire game. And it was a
doubly unfortunate thing for Sonntag seeing that Sonntag had just been
shot three times with his own automatic and was now dead or should be.

It was like Sonntag--and most utterly unlike Trencher--to whine over
spilt milk and seek to shift the blame for the failure of their plot to
any pair of shoulders rather than his own thin pair. And to the very
life it was like Sonntag that at the climax of the quarrel he should
have made a gun play. As Trencher now realised, it had been his mistake
in the first place that he took Sonntag on for a partner in the thwarted
operation; but it had been Sonntag's great, fatal mistake that he had
drawn a weapon against a man who could think faster and a