"Here!" says the journalist reporter; "wait a minute. There's a broker I know on the next floor. Wait till I put this truck in his safe. I want you fellows to take a drink on me before you go." "On you?" says Buck, winking solemn. "Don't you go and try to make 'em believe at the office you said that. Thanks. We can't spare the time, I reckon. So long." And me and Buck slides out the door; and that's the way the Golconda Company went into involuntary liquefaction. If you had seen me and Buck the next night you'd have had to go to a little bum hotel over near the West Side ferry landings. We was in a little back room, and I was filling up a gross of six-ounce bottles with hydrant water colored red with aniline and flavored with cinnamon. Buck was smoking, contented, and he wore a decent brown derby in place of his silk hat. "It's a good thing, Pick," says he, as he drove in the corks, "that we got Brady to lend us his horse and wagon for a week. We'll rustle up the stake by then. This hair tonic'll sell right along over in Jersey. Bald heads ain't popular over there on account of the mosquitoes." Directly I dragged out my valise and went down in it for labels. "Hair tonic labels are out," says I. "Only about a dozen on hand." "Buy some more," says Buck. We investigated our pockets and found we had just enough money to settle our hotel bill in the morning and pay our passage over the ferry. "Plenty of the 'Shake-the-Shakes Chill Cure' labels," says I, after looking. "What more do you want?" says Buck. "Slap 'em on. The chill season is just opening up in the Hackensack low grounds. What's hair, anyway, if you have to shake it off?" We pasted on the Chill Cure labels about half an hour and Buck says: "Making an honest livin's better than that Wall Street, anyhow; ain't it, Pick?" "You bet," says I. HOSTAGES TO MOMUS I I never got inside of the legitimate line of graft but once. But, one time, as I say, I reversed the decision of the revised statutes and undertook a thing that I'd have to apologize for even under the New Jersey trust laws. Me and Caligula Polk, of Muskogee in the Creek Nation, was down in the Mexican State of Tamaulipas running a peripatetic lottery and monte game. Now, selling lottery tickets is a government graft in Mexico, just like selling forty-eight cents' worth of postage-stamps for forty-nine cents is over here. So Uncle Porfirio he instructs the _rurales_ to attend to our case. _Rurales_? They're a sort of country police; but don't draw any mental crayon portraits of the worthy constables with a tin star and a gray goatee. The _rurales_--well, if we'd mount our Supreme Court on broncos, arm 'em with Winchesters, and start 'em out after John Doe _et al_. we'd have about the same thing.