Page:Cherokee Trails (1928).pdf/17

 head over the fence. I says 'Feller, you've got money to burn; go on in and burn it.'"

"Where was that at?" Sid looked across at Wallace with a sort of patronizing, kindly interest in his adventure.

"The caff up at the Coates House."

"Hell! You didn't break in there, did you?" Sid inquired, a big grin working a surprising transformation in his long, solemn face.

"I'm tellin' you," said Wallace, twisting his head in portentous expression of revelations to come.

Wallace paused there with the true dramatist's valuation of suspense. Joe Lobdell laid a slap that measured his appreciation on his friend's rounded shoulders, and Wallace, who was a light-eyed man with large protruding teeth, looked around his little circle with the warm glow of a man who had much to bestow and was going to pass it out with liberal hand.

"You was lucky they didn't pitch you out on your neck," said the boss.

"Maybe I was," Wallace agreed, "but that bouncer was as nice as a come-on man. He tolled me off to a feed-box in one corner of the krel and sent a he-waiter to see what I was eatin'. Well, I thinks I'm in, and I'll go the limit. I looked over that chuck list a minute and I says to him 'Come totin' it all in, son,' I says, and I lent back and hooked my arm over m' cheer like money wasn't no objection to me."

"The hell you did!" said the boss. "Did he fetch you all of it?"

"No, he didn't," Wallace confessed, but without re-