The Sanctimonious Kid’s face wore a serious look the next evening when we met to go to dinner. “Kid,” he said, “the more I think of this wonderful pigeon-blood ruby the less I think of it, if you understand what I mean. It is possible that we put too much faith in the integrity of the business firm that displayed it so carelessly. I was out to the park to-day and gave the thing a careful inspection in the sunlight, and there is a cold, clammy suspicion in my mind that we have been swindled—in short, I am afraid the thing is a rank phony. “And the worst of it is there’s not one person in five thousand who knows a real ruby when he sees it. There are probably three men in San Francisco who would know, but they are all square business men and we can’t submit it to any of them. The next nearest man is the buyer for the big Mormon store, Zion’s Co-operative Mercantile Institution, at Salt Lake City. I will take a run back there with it and get some one to have him give an opinion on it. If it’s genuine I can get a thousand dollars on it. I’ll be gone about two weeks, and this is what I want you to do while I am away. “Put on your best clothes, keep clean and neat, and spend your evenings around the Diamond Palace in Montgomery Street. Go through the whole block on both sides of the street. Look into every hallway, basement, empty store, and saloon. Try to locate some place that we can go through and out into an alley or another street. The getaway’s the thing, and if you can find one in the block we’ll chance the Diamond Palace some evening, maybe Christmas Eve.” He left next morning after giving me strict orders to keep away from the wine dumps and attend to business. I worked faithfully and soon found half a dozen places that would serve. My time was now my own, and once more I began exploring the byways of the city. The hypos I spent the night with in the city prison had aroused my curiosity about Chinatown. I put in many nights prowling through the alleys watching these mysterious people gambling, smoking opium, and trafficking in their women slaves. There were rumors of strange, mysterious underground passages below the streets and under the buildings, but I never saw them and I have since come to doubt whether they ever existed. The spots most favored in Chinatown by the hypos and small beggars were the “cook ovens,” places built in back of Chinese lodging houses where the occupants did their cooking on the community plan. There were warm places around the ovens to sleep in, and always a bite to eat for the asking—no Chinaman refuses to feed a hungry man. In my experience with the Chinese I have found them charitable, frugal, thrifty, moral, and honest.