visit at one of these havens of refuge,
flung a handful of gold and bills into the laps of the kids playing
on the floor, without knowing whether my contribution was a hundred
dollars or a thousand.

When old-timers make a big haul they generally go far away to one of
the big cities to spend their money. Green hands, however successful a
hold-up they make, nearly always give themselves away by showing too
much money near the place where they got it.

I was in a job in '94 where we got twenty thousand dollars. We
followed our favourite plan for a get-away--that is, doubled on our
trail--and laid low for a time near the scene of the train's bad luck.
One morning I picked up a newspaper and read an article with big
headlines stating that the marshal, with eight deputies and a posse of
thirty armed citizens, had the train robbers surrounded in a mesquite
thicket on the Cimarron, and that it was a question of only a few
hours when they would be dead men or prisoners. While I was reading
that article I was sitting at breakfast in one of the most elegant
private residences in Washington City, with a flunky in knee pants
standing behind my chair. Jim was sitting across the table talking to
his half-uncle, a retired naval officer, whose name you have often
seen in the accounts of doings in the capital. We had gone there and
bought rattling outfits of good clothes, and were resting from our
labours among the nabobs. We must have been killed in that mesquite
thicket, for I can make an affidavit that we didn't surrender.

Now I propose to tell why it is easy to hold up a train, and, then,
why no one should ever do it.

In the first place, the attacking party has all the advantage. That
is, of course, supposing that they are old-timers with the necessary
experience and courage. They have the outside and are protected by
the darkness, while the others are in the light, hemmed into a small
space, and exposed, the moment they show a head at a window or door,
to the aim of a man who is a dead shot and who won't hesitate to
shoot.

But, in my opinion, the main condition that makes train robbing easy
is the element of surprise in connection with the imagination of the
passengers. If you have ever seen a horse that has eaten loco weed you
will understand what I mean when I say that the passengers get locoed.
That horse gets the awfullest imagination on him in the world. You
can't coax him to cross a little branch stream two feet wid