pompous and regardless dressers, finding that looks went further than
anything else in our business, except maybe our knowledge of railroad
schedules and an autograph photo of the President that Loeb sent us,
probably by mistake. Andy wrote a nature letter once and sent it in
about animals that he had seen caught in a trap lots of times. Loeb
must have read it 'triplets,' instead of 'trap lots,' and sent the
photo. Anyhow, it was useful to us to show people as a guarantee of
good faith.

"Me and Andy never cared much to do business in New York. It was
too much like pothunting. Catching suckers in that town is like
dynamiting a Texas lake for bass. All you have to do anywhere between
the North and East rivers is to stand in the street with an open bag
marked, 'Drop packages of money here. No checks or loose bills taken.'
You have a cop handy to club pikers who try to chip in post office
orders and Canadian money, and that's all there is to New York for a
hunter who loves his profession. So me and Andy used to just nature
fake the town. We'd get out our spyglasses and watch the woodcocks
along the Broadway swamps putting plaster casts on their broken legs,
and then we'd sneak away without firing a shot.

"One day in the papier mâché palm room of a chloral hydrate and hops
agency in a side street about eight inches off Broadway me and Andy
had thrust upon us the acquaintance of a New Yorker. We had beer
together until we discovered that each of us knew a man named
Hellsmith, traveling for a stove factory in Duluth. This caused us to
remark that the world was a very small place, and then this New Yorker
busts his string and takes off his tin foil and excelsior packing and
starts in giving us his Ellen Terris, beginning with the time he used
to sell shoelaces to the Indians on the spot where Tammany Hall now