He is still smiling, but there’s no mystery about it now. You sit in your room not fifteen feet away, open-mouthed in amazed admiration. What a fox he is, to roll his money up in the curtain! What a plant! What chance would a prowler have of finding his money?
He sits down with his back to you and you hear him drop one shoe on the floor; in about a minute you hear the other one drop. Then he goes over to the door, turns the key, and snaps the light out. In fifteen minutes you can hear him breathing like a blacksmith’s bellows.
He is healthy, he is a good eater and drinker, he is a sound sleeper. But the thing looks suspiciously soft to you and you wonder if the fat man might not be a smart dick framing for you. You decide he isn’t because he locked his door.
“Well,” you say to yourself, “bad luck or good luck, I’m going after that dough.”
You don’t mind his door being locked. You know your business; you have three ways of opening it. You go out and down the hall to a small room where the Chinese bed maker keeps his brooms, buckets, mops, and other things, and get a small parcel of delicate instruments you keep planted there. You go back to your room and wait till, say, four o’clock, when everything is dead and all the guests are in and abed. Then you go around into the fat man’s hall, put out the light, and go to work on his door.
You go about the opening of his door confidently, and with a sure touch. You know he is sleeping, you can hear his gusty breathing from where you stand outside. Now you have it unlocked, you open it, step in, and close it. The chair is still in place by the window. Your ear follows his regular breathing. You don’t creep around this room as you did in the gambler’s. You walk over to the chair, step upon it lightly, put one hand up against the roller, and pull the curtain down with the other. It makes a little noise. Your back is to the sleeper, but your ear tells you he is safe. When the curtain is about halfway down, your fingers touch the roll of bills, another little pull and you have it.
You step down off the chair and find his vest and trousers. His watch “hefts” heavy. You take it, and you take the silver out of his trousers—just to penalize him for trying to be foxy.
You go out, closing the door carefully behind you. Back in your room you examine the bills and silver carefully—you remember the twenty-dollar bill that cost you two years and two lashings. You find you have more money than you would have got out of both the places you failed in; enough to last you six months if you are careful and don’t gamble.
You plant your instruments in the little room down the hall. Then you go out the back way to dodge the night clerk, and down to an all-night saloon where you put the bills away in your compartment in the big safe. The night bartender is “square”; he knows you and your business. You want to get rid of the watch as quick as possible. It’s worth a hundred dollars. You sell it to him for a twenty-dollar note, glad to be done with it.
Yes, reader, I know what you say to yourself now. You are saying: “Well, he doesn’t have to go to the hop joint this time.”