a lot of it I suppose we got on hindside front
and upside down, but in the course of half an hour we were harnessed for
fair, including a conning tower apiece on our heads. Then we did the
march past just to see how we looked.

"With a little white muslin you'd do to go on as the ghost in 'Hamlet,'"
says the Boss, through his front bars.

"You sound like a junk wagon comin' down the street," says I, "and
you're a fair imitation of a tinshop on parade. Shall we go for a
midnight stroll?"

"I'm ready," says the Boss.

Grabbing up a couple of two-handed skull splitters that I'd laid out to
finish our costumes, we swung open the gate and sasshayed out, calm and
dignified, into the middle of that bunch of brigands.

It wasn't hardly a square deal, of course, they being brought up on a
steady diet of ghost stories; and I reckon there was a spooky look about
us that sent a frappe wireless up and down those dago spines. But, after
all, it was the banana oil the aluminum paint was mixed with that turned
the trick. Smelled it, haven't you? If there's any perfume fitter for a
lost soul than attar of banana oil, it hasn't been discovered. First
they went bug-eyed. Next they sniffed. At the second sniff one big
duffer, with rings in his ears and a fine assortment of second-hand
pepper-boxes in his sash, digs up a scared yell that would have done
credit to one of these Wuxtre-e-e! Wuxtre-e-e! boys, and then he
skiddoos into the rocks like some one had tied a can to him. That set
'em all off, same's when you light the green cracker at the end of the
bunch. Some yelled, some groaned, and some made no remarks. But they
faded. Inside of two minutes by the clock we had the front yard to
ourselves.

"Curtain!" says I to the Boss. "This is where we do a little
disappearing ourselves, before they get curious and come back."

We hustled into the castle, pried ourselves out of our tin roofing,
chucked our dunnage into old Blue Beak's best carryall, hitched a
couple of auction-house steppers, and lit out on the town trail without
so much as stopping to shake a da-da to old Vincenzo.

I didn't breathe real deep, though, until we'd fetched sight of a little
place where the mountain left off and the dago police were supposed to
begin. Just before we got to the first house we sees something up on a
rock at one side of the road. Day was comin', red and sudden, and we saw
who it was on the rock--the lady brigandess. Sure thing!

Now don't