was pretty sickly business for two of us and hard to act out, I can tell
you. About night we landed at one of them little Missouri towns high up
toward Iowa, and had supper at the tavern, and got a room upstairs with a
cot and a double bed in it, but I dumped my bag under a deal table in the
dark hall while we was moving along it to bed, single file, me last, and
the landlord in the lead with a tallow candle. We had up a lot of whisky,
and went to playing high-low-jack for dimes, and as soon as the whisky
begun to take hold of Bud we stopped drinking, but we didn't let him
stop. We loaded him till he fell out of his chair and laid there snoring.

"We was ready for business now. I said we better pull our boots off, and
his'n too, and not make any noise, then we could pull him and haul him
around and ransack him without any trouble. So we done it. I set my
boots and Bud's side by side, where they'd be handy. Then we stripped him
and searched his seams and his pockets and his socks and the inside of
his boots, and everything, and searched his bundle. Never found any
di'monds. We found the screwdriver, and Hal says, 'What do you reckon he
wanted with that?' I said I didn't know; but when he wasn't looking I
hooked it. At last Hal he looked beat and discouraged, and said we'd got
to give it up. That was what I was waiting for. I says:

"'There's one place we hain't searched.'

"'What place is that?' he says.

"'His stomach.'

"'By gracious, I never thought of that! NOW we're on the homestretch, to
a dead moral certainty. How'll we manage?'