“You are learning, Kid. That’s precisely what I intended doing. Mary is safe, and moreover she’ll give me more than I could get around here. The expense of going to her is money spent insuring ourselves against trouble. If I try to drop the stones here, I have to take what the first man offers me or I make a dangerous enemy right there. If I refuse to be robbed and turn down half a dozen offers, I make that many bad friends, and they whisper me into jail. I could give them to some crooked saloon man, who would sell them in an hour and pay me at the rate of five or ten dollars a day, in the hope that before I got all the money I would get pinched for something else, and put away where I couldn’t collect the balance. If I get insistent and demand it all at once, he throws a scare into me thus: ‘Say, now, what’re you trying to do, crowd somebody? If I wanted to be wrong I could turn you in to the coppers and get a favor of them some time. But I’m right. Nevertheless, don’t try to crowd me, see?’ “So I am for Salt Chunk Mary’s in the morning. She’s righter than a golden guinea and is entitled to make the profit on the junk. I’ll be back in ten days. “While I’m away take it easy and don’t go around the residence district at all. You can make the safety box about ten o’clock in the morning and four in the afternoon every day. You might locate something from there. Here’s something else you can do. “Every afternoon go into some good hotel and pay for a room for the night. Register from out of town. When you get the key, go out to your own room and make a duplicate of it. Mark your duplicate so you can identify it, and plant it somewhere. Most of the best places are using these spring locks now and you can’t do anything without a key when there’s a sleeper in the room. In a week you’ll have keys to half a dozen good transient rooms in the best hotels, and I might get some real money out of them. “Go back to the hotel in the evening, tell the clerk you are called out of town and ask for your money back. He will usually give it to you.” I bade Sanc good night and good-by, resolving to have something good located for him on his return from Salt Chunk Mary’s. CHAPTER XII During Sanc’s absence I worked industriously, bettering his instructions by renting two rooms a day and making the duplicate keys. In most instances the clerks returned my money when I told them I was called away and could not occupy the rooms. My days were well filled with work, renting two rooms, making two keys, trying to get my room money refunded and visiting the safety box twice a day, sometimes following a depositor out and around the streets to see what he did with his money.