orts such as Comfort
could take the S.A. & A.P. from San Antonio as far
as Boerne (now on the northern edge of San Antonio)
and then ride a stagecoach the rest of the way.]

"About ten the next morning I steps off the ties into a village that
calls itself Atascosa City. I bought a thirty-cent breakfast and
a ten-cent cigar, and stood on the Main Street jingling the three
pennies in my pocket--dead broke. A man in Texas with only three cents
in his pocket is no better off than a man that has no money and owes
two cents.

"One of luck's favourite tricks is to soak a man for his last
dollar so quick that he don't have time to look it. There I was in
a swell St. Louis tailor-made, blue-and-green plaid suit, and an
eighteen-carat sulphate-of-copper scarf-pin, with no hope in sight
except the two great Texas industries, the cotton fields and grading
new railroads. I never picked cotton, and I never cottoned to a pick,
so the outlook had ultramarine edges.

"All of a sudden, while I was standing on the edge of the wooden
sidewalk, down out of the sky falls two fine gold watches in the
middle of the street. One hits a chunk of mud and sticks. The other
falls hard and flies open, making a fine drizzle of little springs and
screws and wheels. I looks up for a balloon or an airship; but not
seeing any, I steps off the sidewalk to investigate.

"But I hear a couple of yells and see two men running up the street
in leather overalls and high-heeled boots and cartwheel hats. One man
is six or eight feet high, with open-plumbed joints and a heartbroken
cast of countenance. He picks up the watch that has stuck in the mud.
The other man, who is little, with pink hair and white eyes, goes
for the empty case, and says, 'I win.' Then the elevated pessimist
goes down under his leather leg-holsters and hands a handful of
twenty-dollar gold pieces to his albino friend. I don't know how much
money it was; it looked as big as an earthquake-relief fund to me.

"'I'll have this here case filled up with works,' says Shorty, 'and
throw you again for five hundred.'

"'I'm your company,' says the high man. 'I'll meet you at the Smoked
Dog Saloon an hour from now.'

"The little man hustles away with a kind of Swiss movement toward a
jewelry store. The heartbroken person stoops over and takes a
telescopic view of my haberdashery.

"'Them's a mighty slick outfit of habiliments you have go