"You're welcome to see!" Hamar sneered. "Perhaps you'd like some
water!"

"Water! Why water?"

"Well, instead of tea or whisky to help digest the book. Besides, it's
the only thing I have to offer you."

"Look here, Leon," Curtis interrupted; "what's the good of behaving
like this? We are all in the same boat--starving--desperate. So let us
lay our heads together and see if we can't think of something--some
way out of it."

"A Burglary Company Limited, for instance!" Hamar sneered. "No! I'm
not having any. I've neither tools nor experience. The San Francisco
police handle one roughly, so I'm told, and hard labour isn't to my
liking."

"There are other things besides burglary!" Curtis said in tones of
annoyance. "We might work a fake."

"If I work anything of that sort," Hamar said hastily, "I work alone.
Think of something else."

"I tell you Matt and I are pretty well desperate," Curtis cried, "and
if we don't think of something soon, we shan't be able to think at
all. We've tried our level best to get work--we've answered every
likely and unlikely advertisement in the papers--and all to no
purpose. So if Providence won't help us we must help ourselves.