“No, I enlisted as Roberts.”
“Dead to rights. He’ll take Maxie’s word when she identifies her husband to him. All right again. Well, let me play Harry Maidslow, and go with Maxie to the Colonel. I take my thousand, and you take the rest and—Maxie. How’s that?”
“If Maxie will stand for it, I’m ready,” said the deserter.
During the rest of the night, the man who went for a soldier and wished he hadn’t, and the man who didn’t go and wished that he had, lay in an upper corridor of the Hammam discussing the details of their conspiracy.
CHAPTER IX
THE WARDS OF FORTUNE
Soothed by the drone of the Retired Car Conductor’s narrative, and wearied out with the continuous performance of the night’s adventures, the Harvard Freshman fell asleep on the wooden bench in his cell at the Tanks; and it was not until a heavy hand was laid on his shoulder that he awoke. A bluff policeman was standing over him.
“Your order for release has come, and you can go now! You and your pardner was asleep, and I clean forgot you.”
The officer had a similar word with the Conductor, and led the two prisoners out into the corridor. While they were waiting for their property to be taken from the boxes in which it had been stored, Eli Cook felt idly in his pocket and drew out a torn scrap of red paper marked with Chinese writing.
“That’s all they left on me when I was searched,” he said, with a feeble grin. “Want it for a souvenir of a happy evenin’? It dropped out of a Chinaman’s pocket yesterday up to Dupont Street, and I picked it up.”
The Freshman took it, in the same spirit of mockery, and stuffed it into his own pocket to keep company with several pawn tickets. As they went together into the street the city bells were striking two o’clock.