are, only there's just one question I'd like to ask before
the slaughter begins; don't _I_ get no say about the tools we're gonna
use?"

This guy thinks for a minute and then nods his head.

"Very well!" he says. "I'll make the concession--an unheard-of thing
in the code. What is your choice?"

"Pinochle!" yells the Kid. "I'll stake you to a hundred aces and beat
you from here to Denver!"

"Ugh!" snorts the other guy--and castin' a sneer at both of us, he
passes in the gate.

We went in after him, and the Kid tells me how he come to flatten this
baby, which, from the card he give us, was J. Harold Cuthbert. The Kid
says Harold stopped him outside the portals of Film City and asked him
why no auto had met him at the train. Scanlan says he didn't know, but
he had seen the mayor and two brass bands goin' down and hadn't Harold
met 'em? Harold says he had not and he was gonna file a complaint
about it, because he was the greatest movie actor that ever bawled out
a director. With that, says the Kid, he reeled off the names of the
pictures he had been featured in, and from the list he give out the
only thing he wasn't featured in was "Microbes at Play," a educational
film tore off by the company last year. The Kid asks him if he ever
heard of Kid Scanlan, the shop girls' delight, who was bein' starred in
a five-reeler called "Lay Off, MacDuff." Harold throwed out his chest
and says he wrote it and practically made Scanlan by directin' it. At
that the Kid tells him that he may be a movie star, but he looks like a
liar to him. Harold makes a pass at him, and Scanlan hit him to see
would he bounce. He didn't, and he was just comin' around when I
blowed on the scene.

When we got to Genaro's office, Harold was tellin' Eddie Duke the
reason he was bunged up was because he had fell off the train comin'
out, and Eddie says that was tough and it was time Congress got after
them railroads, but the thing he'd like to know was why Harold had come
out at all. They had looked up the files and there was nothin' to show
who had ordered this guy shipped on.

Harold looks over the bunch in the office for a minute, registers
"I-am-thinking-deeply," and then snaps his fingers.

"Oh!" he says. "I had a letter of introduction from Mr. Potts, but I
suppose it's in my gray morning suit which will arrive with my trunks
in a day or so. Mr. Potts and myself are old friends," he winks at
Genaro confidentially. "I really think