“He’s just finished a long stretch in the stir at Canon City. His health ain’t none too good, so he jumps over into Utah and down on the ‘poultice route,’ where he won’t be pestered by bulls while he’s recuperatin’ on good fresh air an’ green vegetables an’ plenty of bread and milk. He flops in a haystack five miles out of the town where you people cut the caper. At daylight the next morning the hoosiers drag him out and he thinks they’re goin’ to lynch him. They take him into the town an’ give him a look at the stiff laid out on the courthouse floor. He raps to George, an’ just as you say, he is almost cut in half by the two shotgun loads. Red don’t see any use in givin’ himself a bawl-out by identifyin’ any dead burglars, so he dummies up on the natives an’ in a couple of days they let him go, an’ he keeps on goin’, for they are proper hostile. When Roch’ Red tells me this, I dash into Portland and out over the Short Line into Pocatello, an’ tells Mary.” “What was all your hurry about?” I asked. “Hah,” Hannibal replied. “That’s somethin’ Red didn’t know, an’ somethin’ you don’t know. But you’re all right, an’ I don’t mind tellin’ you. “George and Mary was raised in my home town, Hannibal, Missouri, an’ George was her brother. They was a mysterious pair, an’ there’s no use tryin’ to figure what become of Mary.” When my breath came back, I said: “Well, that explains to me why George ‘sprayed’ Gold Tooth with all that lead at Pocatello.” “Oh, yes. Tell me about that, Blacky. I never got the straight of it.” In return for Hannibal’s tale, I ordered a fresh bottle, and over it told him the story of Gold Tooth’s death at the hands of Foot-and-a-half George. Unable to gather any more information about Mary, I turned to work again, making the towns of Spokane, Portland, Seattle, and Tacoma, confining myself strictly to house burglary, which is “one man” work. This kind of thievery is fast becoming a thing of the past. Better lighting, policing, and locking systems; the apartment house; the building of “tighter” residences; the better treatment of dogs which makes them more intelligent; and more efficient and careful servants have combined to put the old-time house burglar almost out of business. And that is well, for of all manner of theft it is the most nerve-racking on both the burglar and the householder. I never crawled into a window that I didn’t think of Smiler. I never stepped in or out of a door without thinking of old George. Yet I kept it up for years, and quit it only because I got tired of playing the peon for crooked pawnbrokers and getting “fifty fifty” from the professional “fences.” The fences’ notion of “fifty fifty” is to put a lead dollar in the Salvation Army tambourine and ask the lassie for fifty cents change.