e when that lamentable boll-worm took his departure. He was a
disgrace to every non-industrial profession in the country. With all
his big schemes and fine offices he had wound up unable even to get an
honest meal except by the kindness of a strange and maybe unscrupulous
burglar. I was glad to see him go, though I felt a little sorry for
him, now that he was ruined forever. What could such a man do without
a big capital to work with? Why, Alfred E. Ricks, as we left him, was
as helpless as turtle on its back. He couldn't have worked a scheme to
beat a little girl out of a penny slate-pencil.

"When me and Bill Bassett was left alone I did a little
sleight-of-mind turn in my head with a trade secret at the end of
it. Thinks I, I'll show this Mr. Burglar Man the difference between
business and labor. He had hurt some of my professional self-adulation
by casting his Persians upon commerce and trade.

"'I won't take any of your money as a gift, Mr. Bassett,' says I to
him, 'but if you'll pay my expenses as a travelling companion until we
get out of the danger zone of the immoral deficit you have caused in
this town's finances to-night, I'll be obliged.'

"Bill Bassett agreed to that, and we hiked westward as soon as we
could catch a safe train.

"When we got to a town in Arizona called Los Perros I suggested
that we once more try our luck on terra-cotta. That was the home of
Montague Silver, my old instructor, now retired from business. I knew
Monty would stake me to web money if I could show him a fly buzzing
'round the locality. Bill Bassett said all towns looked alike to
him as he worked mainly in the dark. So we got off the train in Los
Perros, a fine little town in the silver region.

"I had an elegant little sure thing in the way of a commercial
slungshot that I intended to hit Bassett behind the ear with. I wasn't
going to take his money while he was asleep, but I was going to leave
him with a lottery ticket that would represent in experience to him
$4,755--I think that was the amount he had when we got off the train.
But the first time I hinted to him about an investment, he turns on me
and disencumbers himself of the following terms and expressions.

"'Brother Peters,' says he, 'it ain't a bad idea to go into an
enterprise of some kind, as you suggest. I think I will. But if I do
it will be such a cold proposition that nobody but Robert E. Peary and
Charlie Fairbanks will be able to sit on the board of direc