Mary bought or sold anything crooked. Johnnie paid her for a couple of guns and gave her an address in Chicago to express them to. He could have bought them cheaper there, but in the matter of buying guns he was careful. Mary was square, and no matter what happened, she would not talk. “Be sure and get thirty-eight caliber, Mary,” he cautioned. “I won’t have any off calibers or strange make of guns. I want the kind that everybody else has. I don’t want to shoot anybody, but if I do they won’t dig a forty-one caliber slug out of him and find a forty-one caliber gun on me.” We parted at Pocatello, agreeing to “weigh in” (meet) at Ogden in the spring; Johnnie starting home, where he never arrived, and we to the Coast. CHAPTER XI We arrived in San Francisco safely and without incident. The first thing was to get rooms. My experience in the matter of Smiler inclined me toward a room by myself. Sanc, always cautious, decided it would be safest to have separate rooms. I found a nice, quiet German hotel in the Mission where I located, and Sanc found himself a place downtown. After getting settled, Sanc took our paper money to a bank and got gold for it. At that time storekeepers hesitated about taking paper. Many of them did not know good from bad paper, there was so little of it in circulation, and they had been loaded up with Confederate bills till they were suspicious of any paper and sometimes called in a copper to inspect it and the person who proffered it. We didn’t want any of this thing, and got gold at once. “Now for another safety box,” said Sanc. “I would prefer the bank, straight, but there’s too many formalities about putting it in and getting it out, and besides that you can do a lot of locating if you have a safety box. You can go in two or more times a day and you will always see people going and coming to their boxes with money or jewelry. Many women have all their jewelry in safety boxes and only take it out when they want to display it at a theater or party. They lift it on the afternoon of the evening they want to wear it, and put it back the next morning, but they have to keep it at home that night. Simplest thing in the world to tail them home from the bank. “The safety box is also used,” he continued to illuminate me, “by race-horse men, gamblers, and the moneyed macquereau, and I don’t mind telling you that I’d rather ‘prowl’ one of them than any business man. It’s a joy to hear one of them squawk, and most of them would put the old index finger on you or me in a minute, just by the way of alibi.