h?' I says.
'Can't you wait for the remains?'

"'Keep ca'm,' he says, 'and look again. Your first look wasn't a
success. I don't mean the undertaker's,' he says; 'I mean the place next
door beyond. It's a delicatessen dump,' he says, 'containing cold grub
all ready to be et without tools,' he says. 'And what's more,' he says,
'the worthy delicatessener is engaged at this present moment in locking
up and going away from here. In about a half an hour,' he says, 'he'll
be setting in his happy German-American home picking his teeth after
supper, and reading comic jokes to his little son August out of the
_Fleagetty Bladder_. And shortly thereafter,' he says, 'what'll you and
me be doing? We'll be there, in that vittles emporium, in the midst of
plenty,' he says, 'filling our midsts with plenty of plenty. That's what
we'll be doing,' he says.

"'Sweet Caps,' I says, reviving slightly, remember who we are? Remember
the profession which we adorn? Would you,' I says, 'sink to burglary?'

"'Scandalous,' he says, with feeling, 'I'm so hollow I could sink about
three feet without touching nothing whatsoever. Death before dishonor,
but not death by quick starvation. Are you with me,' he says, 'or ain't
you?'

"Well, what could you say to an argument like that? Nothing, not a
syllable. So eventually night ensoos. And purty soon the little stars
come softly out and at the same juncture me and the Sweet Caps Kid goes
in. We goes into an alley behind that row of shops and after feeling
about in the darkness for quite a spell and falling over a couple of
fences and a lurking wheelbarrow and one thing and another, we finds a
back window with a weak latch on it and we pries it open and we crawls
in.

"Only, just as we gits inside all nice and snug, Sweet Caps he has to go
and turn over a big long box that's standing up on end, and down it
comes _ker-blim_! making a most hideous loud noise.

"Then we hears somebody upstairs run across the floor over our heads and
hears 'em pile down the steps, which is built on the outside of the
building to save building 'em on the inside of the building, and in
about a half a minute a fire bell or some similar appliance down the
street a piece begins to ring its head off.

"'The stuff's off,' says Sweet Caps to me in a deep, skeered whisper.
'Let's beat it.'

"'Nix,' I says. 'You fasten that there window! I'm too weak to run now,
and if they'll give me about five minutes among the vittles I'll