“Because it’s crooked and no fence will give you more. It’s a great game, Kid. The fence divides it by four, taking seventy-five per cent of the value to pay him for the chances he takes. The loser, reporting to the insurance company, multiplies it by four to pay himself for the extrinsic value of his junk, and the annoyance caused by his burglar.”
He turned to the stuff I threw on the bed. “Better brush your clothes off carefully, Kid. There are still some smudges on your coat.” He looked at me critically. “And a button gone.” He pointed to where there should have been a button. “Take that suit off. Put on your old one. That button is around that porch and it’s enough to bury us both in Quentin. Tear the tailor’s tags out of those clothes, wrap them up, go out, and throw them in a lot somewhere, not too close to this place. To-morrow you can order a new suit. That one is poison. While you’re out, I’ll take these stones out of their ‘harness.’”
It broke my heart to throw away a new suit of clothes, but I was a good apprentice and obeyed. When I returned he had finished “unharnessing” the stones. There was a fistful of broken gold settings, and some small articles of little value. “Wrap that junk up, kid, take it out and throw it in a lot and not the same lot you left the clothes in, either,” said the master.
I tore a sheet from a newspaper, and, wrapping the junk up, started out again. He stopped me. “Wouldn’t it be just as well to take the balance of that paper and throw it away, Kid? Why leave it in the room? It fits the piece you have in your pocket. And be sure to throw that junk away. Don’t plant it somewhere against a rainy day. Throw it away,” he finished emphatically.
Again I obeyed. When I got back he had planted the stones, a very small parcel now, in the hotel wash room. On our way out he said, “One more thing now, and I will feel safe. We will get a new hat each.”
We left the old ones in the store, “to be called for.”
“Now, Kid, something to eat, and I will sum up for you the doings of this evening.” Seated in a quiet restaurant with decent dinners before us, Sanc began.
“You probably thought when you were seized coming down the porch that I had abandoned you.”
I protested, “No, no.”
“Well, that’s what I would have thought if I had been in your place. You see, I saw the party coming toward the door just as you were dropping off the porch roof. I was afraid if I started anything then you would go back up and get trapped inside the house. So I let things go along naturally till I thought they had gone far enough.”