ship a million lovely loaves--"

"Merciful Heavens!" yells the dame. "A sign! Henery, shall I go back?"

"Back is right!" says the voice. "These guys is cheap crooks and they
ain't no Marc Anthony!"

The lights go out and Honest Dan comes to, rushin' over to the stout
dame with a million alibis tryin' to be first out of his mouth. I beat
it around to the back, but the professor has gone somewheres else while
the goin' was fair to medium.

"You have deceived me, you wretch!" screams the stout dame. "You
have--"

That's as far as she got, because right in the middle of it she pulls a
faint, and daughter eases her to the floor. The Kid hops out of the
cabinet and grabs Honest Dan.

"Beat it, you rat," bawls Scanlan, "before I commit mayhem!"

From the way Honest Dan went out of that room, he must have passed
Samoa, the first hour!

Daughter reaches up and grabs the Kid's hand.

"I--I--want to thank you," she says, "for saving my mother. I--I don't
know what might have happened, if you hadn't been here!"

"That's all right!" pipes the Kid. "D'ye want us to do anything else?"

"Yes," she says. "Will you tell me where you heard that--that
description of the--the million lovely loaves?"

"Sure," answers the Kid. "When we was comin' East, we stopped off at a
hick burg somewheres and a guy took us over a bakery--"

Daughter claps her hands and laughs.

"Poetic justice!" she says. "That explains everything. My poor, dear
father founded that bakery, and those were the last advertisements for
it he wrote!"

CHAPTER VII

LIFE IS REEL!

The nation is bein' flooded these days with advertisements claimin'
that any white man which works for less than forty thousand bucks a
year is a sucker. The best of 'em is wrote by a friend of mine, Joe
Higgins, who gets all of twenty bucks every Saturday at six--one-thirty
in July, August and September.

The ads that Joe tears off deals with inventions. He shows that Edison
prob'ly wouldn't of made a nickel over a million, if he hadn't
discovered everything but America, and that Bell, Marconi, Fulton and
that gang, wouldn't of been any better known to-day than ham and eggs,
if they hadn't used their brains for purposes of thinkin' and invented
somethin'. There's fortunes which would make the Vanderbilts and
Astors look like public charges, explains Joe, awaitin' the bird which
will quit playin' Kelly pool some night and invent a new way to do
_anything_.