“To-morrow, Kid, while we have plenty of coin, I want you to get a couple of guns. Thirty-eights,” and he named a certain standard make. “No other kind, remember. You heard what Soldier Johnnie said, and he knew what he was doing. I suppose you’ll go to the first hardware store for them, eh?” he said rather severely.
Those were the good, or bad, old days when any wild-eyed maniac could rush into a hardware store or pawnshop with money enough and buy a gun, guaranteed to kill a man a block away. They would take the number of it, to be sure, in order to get witness fees if the gun worked properly. To-day it’s a little more difficult to buy a gun in California. The better stores will not sell them unless the purchaser has a permit. The other stores, and they are quite numerous, take your money to-day for the gun, and to-morrow you go to the store and get it.
“Oh, I don’t know, I might look around a bit,” I said. “How about getting them in a hockshop?”
“That would be just the place, kid, if you were going to shoot a burglar or stick-up man, but in this instance there’s a difference. I’ve been carrying a gun around for ten years. Every time I fired it I was in the wrong, legally speaking, see? I’ve been lucky enough so far not to have killed anybody, and hope I never do, but you have to be careful just the same. The hardware store has the number of every gun. The hockshop man not only notes the number, but in most cases puts a mark on it for future reference. Your hockshop man, kid, is the hangman’s handmaiden.
“You will get those guns in Chinatown at different places, one to-morrow morning and one in the evening. You have plenty of time, and the best way to spend it is in taking precautions against trouble. The Chinks are safe to do any kind of business with, buying or selling. They don’t talk. I’ll show you the kind of place to go this evening. The guns you will buy are probably stolen from some pig-iron dump (hardware store) outside of the state, and come into the Chinks’ hands by such devious routes that the numbers are long since lost track of.”
The guns and cartridges were duly bought and put away in the safety box with most of our money. The keys we planted about the places where we lived. Our clothes were few and in bad shape. Sanc proposed going to a tailor.
“Yes,” I said. “Here’s where one of my ambitions comes to a head. I’m going to have a nice gray suit, gray hat, and a fine leather trunk,” my mind going back to the gray man and his traveled trunk that I worshiped on the depot platform in my little town. It seemed an age since then.
“If you dress yourself that way, Kid, we part. Where did you gather that insane notion? A gray suit, gray hat, leather trunk! I suppose you’d have stickers on the trunk so the coppers wouldn’t have to ask you where you were from.”
I was silent, ashamed to tell him where I got the notion.
“It’s just as I said about the guns; you might wear that rig if you were out hunting burglars, but you wouldn’t get many. Even the ‘dicks’ have too much sense to dress that way. Do you want everybody to look at you? Do you want everybody that looks at you to remember you? You do not. You want as few people to look at you as possible, and you want those few to forget you as soon as possible,” he continued, with emphasis.