I forgot to tell you about the steak. I don’t see how I left that out, for, really, that’s what caused the whole trouble. It beats all what little things will do, don’t it? Now, lots o’ times in my life it has seemed as if the smallest things had the most to do with me. There was that red waist, for instance, that she wore that day she was waitin’ on the table. I ‘most know I never would have paid any attention to her if it hadn’t been for that red waist. And then that beefsteak—in one way I’m goin’ to get hung on account of that beefsteak. How many times since that I’ve just wished I hadn’t stopped and bought it. But you see I was feelin’ cold all day, and when I come ‘round Thirty-fifth Street the wind kind of got in my face worse’n it had done before, and it sort of struck me through the chest too; my legs didn’t feel it quite so much, because they had the blanket over ‘em. Well, just as I got up to the second corner there was a saloon right in front of me. This was before I got to the corner when I met the senators, and I thought I’d go in and get a drink; and then right on the other side was that meat market and there was a lot of chickens and steak and things hangin’ in the window, and they looked mighty good, for I hadn’t had much to eat all day. At first I thought I’d go and get a drink, and then I thought I could get enough steak for supper for just about what the drink would cost, and the steak would do the most good, and besides she and the kid could have some of that, and I thought it would make her feel pleasanter and liven her up a bit. We hadn’t been gettin’ along any too well for some time. “So I pulled up the horse a minute and went into the shop and asked the butcher about the steak hangin’ in the window, and he told me that it was sixteen cents a pound and that it was a sirloin steak. I thought that was most too much and asked him if he hadn’t some cheaper kind. He said yes, that a rump steak was just as good, and he showed me one of them and the whole piece came to fifteen cents—just the price of a glass of whiskey—and I bought it and rolled it up in a piece of brown paper and went away. “Now I was tellin’ about this to the good guard that likes to get statistics for the Citizens’ Association, and I told him it was the beefsteak that brought me here, and that if I had only got the whisky instead of the steak it wouldn’t have happened, but he argued the other way, and then when I stuck to my story he got kind of mad about it and said it was them drinks I had with the senators and the assessor that really done it, and if it hadn’t been for the drinks I’d have known better, and he said he was goin’ to put it down that way, and I’m sure he did. I hain’t no doubt but a good many of the figgers we see about penitentiaries and things is got up the same way.