"So he fastens her up from the inside, and while we hears the aroused and infuriated populace surrounding the place and getting ready to begin to think about making up their minds to advance en massy, I pulls down the front shades and strikes a match and lights up a coal-oil lamp and reaches round for something suitable to take the first raw edge off my appetite--such as a couple of hams. "Then right off I sees where we has made a fatal mistake, and my heart dies within me and I jest plum collapses and folds up inside of myself like a concertina. And that explains," he concluded, "why you ain't seen me for going on the last eighteen months." "Did they give you eighteen months for breaking into the delicatessen shop?" I asked. Mr. Doolan fetched a long, deep, mournful sigh. "No," he said simply, "they gave us eighteen months for breaking into the undertaker's next door." CHAPTER X A TALE OF WET DAYS In the days before the hydrant-headed specter of Prohibition reared its head in the Sunny South I had this tale from a true Kentucky gentleman. As he gave it to me, so, reader, do I give it to you: "Yes, suh, to this good day Colonel Bud Crittenden ain't never fergot that time he made the mistake about Stony Buggs and the Bear Grass County man. It learnt him a lesson, though. It learnt him that the deceivingest pusson on earth, when it comes to seeping up licker, is a little feller with his eyes fur apart and one of these here excitable Adamses' apples. "Speaking about it afterwards to a passel of boys over in the swopping ring, he said the experience, while dissapinting at the time, was worth a right smart to him subsequent. Previous to that time he said he was in error regarding the amount of licker a little man, with them peculiarities of features I just mentioned, could chamber at one setting. "Said he knowed some of the derndest, keenest gunfighters in the state was little men and he'd always acknowledged that spare-built, narrer-waisted men made the best hands driving trotting hawses; but he didn't know, not until then, that they was so gifted in the matter of putting away sweet'ning drams. "It happened the time we all was up at Frankfort nomernating a Clerk of the Court of Appeals. There'd been a deadlock for nigh on to three days. The up-state delegates was all solid for old General Marcellus Brutus Hightower of Limestone County, and our fellers to a man was pledged to Major Zach Taylor Simms, of Pennroyal. "Ballot after ballot it stood the same way--fifty-three to fifty-three. Then on the mawning of the third day one of their deligates from the mountains was called home suddenly by a message saying a misunderstanding had come up with a neighboring fambly and two of his boys was shot up consid'rable.