"Wonder if I couldn't help git the proof," suggested Shorty, with his sleuth instincts reviving.
"Just the man," said the Chief Clerk eagerly, "if you go about it right. You're a stranger here, and scarcely anybody knows that you belong to Headquarters. Get yourself back in the shape you were this morning, and go out and try your luck. It'll just be bully if we can down this old blowhard."
Shorty took off his belt and white gloves, unbuttoned his blouse, and lounged down the street to the quarter where the soldiers most congregated to be fleeced by the harpies gathered there as the best place to catch men going to or returning from the front. Shorty soon recognized running evil-looking shops, various kinds of games and drinking dens several men who had infested the camps about Nashville and Murfreesboro until the Provost-Marshal had driven them away.
"Billings has gathered all his old friends about him," said he to himself. "I guess I'll find somebody here that I kin use."
"Hello, Injianny; what are you doin' here?" inquired a man in civilian clothes, but unmistakably a gambler.
Shorty remembered him at once as the man with whom he had had the adventure with the loaded dice at Murfreesboro. With the fraternity of the class, neither remembered that little misadventure against the other. They had matched their wits for a wrestle, and when the grapple was over it was over.
Shorty therefore replied pleasantly:
"O, jest loafin' back here, gittin' well o' a crack on the head and the camp fever."
"Into anything to put in the time?"
"Naah," said Shorty weariedly. "Nearly dead for something. Awful stoopid layin' around up there among them hayseeds, doin' nothin'. Jest run down to Jeffersonville to see if I couldn't strike something that'd some life in it."