He did not know, any more than his newly-made friends did, that by telling his story to the police he would be taken care of until his relatives in Chicago could be written to, and he believed that he must depend upon his own exertions to get home. Therefore he eagerly accepted the generous offer.
“But where can I live?” he asked, as the thought came to him that even though a chance for making himself rich had suddenly presented itself, he was still without a home.
“Didn’t Ben tell yer that we’d been ’vestin’ our money in real estate?” asked Johnny, almost impatiently, and speaking rather indistinctly because of his mouth being so filled with candy. “We’ve got a place we bought of Dickey Spry, an’ you can stay with us if you pay your share.”
Paul was willing to go into any extravagances for the sake of having a home, provided his two tops, and the three cents still remaining of his wealth, was sufficient to make the first payment. This he told his friends.
“Shiner didn’t mean that you was to pay it right down,” said Ben, quickly. “After you git to makin’ money for yourself, all you’ve got to do is to buy your share of the things.”
As that was only just, Paul agreed to it, and Johnny, who had by this time succeeded in eating the dark-colored mixture that was by courtesy called candy, started off to dispose of the papers he still held under his arm, while Ben led Paul away with him.
“Johnny has got to ’tend right up to biz,” said Ben, in a half-explanatory way, “or else he’d git stuck, you know.”
“Would he?” asked Paul, in evident alarm. “Who would stick him?”
Ben looked at this young gentleman from Chicago in surprise, and then in pity. He could not understand how any one, and more especially a boy, could be so ignorant of the meaning of one of the most common words of slang. At first he looked as if he was about to reprove such ignorance; but he evidently thought better of it, for he said, instead,
“I mean that he’d be stuck by havin’ a lot of this afternoon’s papers left over on his hands, an’ he couldn’t sell ’em termorrer, you know.”