day,' goes on this gentle despoiler of pig-pens, 'I hope to
become reckernized as the champion shoat-stealer of the world.'

"'It's proper to be ambitious,' says I; 'and hog-stealing will do very
well for Mount Nebo; but in the outside world, Mr. Tatum, it would be
considered as crude a piece of business as a bear raid on Bay State
Gas. However, it will do as a guarantee of good faith. We'll go into
partnership. I've got a thousand dollars cash capital; and with that
homeward-plods atmosphere of yours we ought to be able to win out a
few shares of Soon Parted, preferred, in the money market.'

"So I attaches Rufe, and we go away from Mount Nebo down into the
lowlands. And all the way I coach him for his part in the grafts I had
in mind. I had idled away two months on the Florida coast, and was
feeling all to the Ponce de Leon, besides having so many new schemes
up my sleeve that I had to wear kimonos to hold 'em.

"I intended to assume a funnel shape and mow a path nine miles wide
though the farming belt of the Middle West; so we headed in that
direction. But when we got as far as Lexington we found Binkley
Brothers' circus there, and the blue-grass peasantry romping into
town and pounding the Belgian blocks with their hand-pegged sabots as
artless and arbitrary as an extra session of a Datto Bryan drama. I
never pass a circus without pulling the valve-cord and coming down for
a little Key West money; so I engaged a couple of rooms and board for
Rufe and me at a house near the circus grounds run by a widow lady
named Peevy. Then I took Rufe to a clothing store and gent's-outfitted
him. He showed up strong, as I knew he would, after he was rigged up
in the ready-made rutabaga regalia. Me and old Misfitzky stuffed him
into a bright blue suit with a Nile green visible plaid effect, and
riveted on a fancy vest of a light Tuskegee Normal tan color, a red
necktie, and the yellowest pair of shoes in town.

"They were the first clothes Rufe had ever worn except the gingham
layette and the butternut top-dressing of his native kraal, and he
looked as self-conscious as an Igorrote with a new nose-ring.

"That night I went down to the circus tents and opened a small shell
game. Rufe was to be the capper. I gave him a roll of phony currency
to bet with and kept a bunch of it in a special pocket to pay his
winnings out of. No; I didn't mistrust him; but I simply can't
manipulate the ball to lose when I see real money bet. My fing