He sent me after two keys, for the front and back doors of the new house, and said he would pay me and dismiss me when I returned. I went to the locksmith's and got the two keys, but--well, you know how careless and absent minded I am, and when I returned I'll be damned if I could find but one of them--I had lost the other. Then he as much as told me that I had hidden the key or given it to an accomplice, so that I could go over and unlock the door of the new house and help myself, and that it strengthened his convictions all along that I didn't work for a living. That sure made me hot under the collar, and I got eloquent and told him that his theories were preposterous in the extreme, and that I was well aware of the fact that I was no Hercules, but if it were not for the kind treatment of his wife, I'd thrash him right there. I got warm and excited and reached in my pocket for my handkerchief to wipe away the perspiration. That little fool must have misunderstood my purpose, for then, old man, honest Injun, cross my heart, he ran over to the dresser, took a loaded revolver from the drawer, and fired. The bullet went through the glass back of me with a racket capable of waking the dead. His wife fainted, I rushed him, and hit him a left hook that would have broken any punching machine manufactured. This sounds rather boastful, considering my slight build, but I was in a heat, and it meant a whole lot to me how hard I hit him. That cowardly whelp then let out a blood curdling yell, and went down, and I realized what a fix I was in. The shot and yell must have attracted the attention of passing pedestrians, for they all gathered in front of the house. Not wishing my name to be given so much publicity in an affair of that calibre, I took the bunch of letters in my inside pocket, went over to the range and threw them in, just as a cop appeared on the scene. Seeing the state of things, the cop hit me over the head with his nightstick, and after viewing at close range planets, heavenly satellites and other decorations of the firmament, I must have collapsed; when I revived, I had on a pair of handcuffs, and the little measly runt was concluding his one-sided story. Well, then, for the first time in my life, but not the last, as you will see later, I was arrested. Went up before the judge next A.M., and, to condense my story, the kernel of the judge's remarks to me was that I looked young and unlike a criminal, but as I had burned my letters, thereby admitting carrying a fictitious name, and was also in a strange town with no visible means of support, he would have to convict me of vagrancy, and concluded his remarks by saying that he hoped it would teach me a lesson. Thirty days! My God! don't attempt to imagine my feelings.