They sold a number of the needle cases, and although Jim had a look of complete disgust upon his face, showing how he disapproved of Danny's lying, the latter, proud as a peacock, instead of being ashamed of swindling kind-hearted ladies, said in a tone of voice which left no doubt that he would do exactly as he proposed: "Eh, Jim, when I get to be a plinger I shall have at least a dozen road kids peddling for me and not like Jocko, who besides myself has only three other kids hustling for him," and after a pause he disdainfully added, just as if his jocker was not already doing incalculable harm, "only four kids, with so many of them hoboing about the country." At one of the houses, after Danny had repeated his tale of woe, a charitable lady told them to await her return as she had left her purse in her bed room, located on the second floor. Never suspecting that boys appealing for assistance would turn into ingrates, she left the front door ajar. The next moment Jim almost sank to the floor when he saw Danny sneak into the house, enter the nearest room, and just as the lady descended the stairs, dart back to his former place upon the porch, holding a silver spoon in his hand, which he hid in his pocket. After the lady had paid him for a needle case they left. Danny repeated this disgraceful trick of basest ingratitude at several other houses. Then he coaxed Jim into making the lying appeal necessary to sell the needle cases, and whenever Jim managed to make a sale Danny's praises knew no bounds. Finally Danny had just one needle case left out of the stock Jocko had handed to him to peddle, and while they waited before the open entrance door of a palatial residence for the return of the lady of the house, who had left them to find her pocketbook, and whose footfalls they could hear as she descended the stairway leading into the basement of her home, Danny deliberately pushed the unsuspecting Jim through the half-open door into the hall of the mansion, and told him in a whisper that if he did not steal something he "would tell Kansas Shorty." In all his past life Jim had never stolen a single cent's worth of other people's property, but with Danny threatening to tell Kansas Shorty should he refuse to do as told, and remembering the cruel pounding he had received at the hands of this fiend only such a short time before, and the warning ere he and Danny set out upon their begging trip to do exactly as Danny ordered, he realized that perhaps another far more brutal beating would be his should he disobey Danny's command.