He didn't believe in none o' your cheap little killin's. He gives 'em all the range they wanted while he was fixin' up the cards; but when he was ready to call their hands, the' was somethin' doin' every minute, an' don't you never forget it. Oh, he was a deep one. It is creepy to think of any one like him bein' turned loose on the earth, 'cause a feller might do somethin' 'at didn't suit him, an' the' wasn't no place you could hide in afterward. He kept watchin' all the while, an' nobody couldn't commit a crime nowheres on earth but what he knew of it, an' he'd go an' call the feller over to one side an' say, "Young man, you are doomed to die; but if you'll promise to do anything I want you to, I'll give the Pope, or the Emp'rer of Chinee, or whoever the main stem happened to be, a scuttle o' diamonds an' get you free—what's the word?"
Well, in a few years the' wasn't half a dozen criminals in the whole world who wasn't bound to carry out his orders, an' you can see what an outfit he had to back him up. Some of 'em he'd make his body-servants; but that wasn't no snap, you can bet, 'cause he was notionable to a degree. He'd make plans for a little party, an' he'd send one man to Siberia for a fish, an' another to Asia for a fowl, an' another to Chinee for a bird's nest—to make soup of—an' so on. He never give his guests nothin' to eat 'at growed in the same country the feast was to be give in. Then he'd say to his steward, who had the hardest job of all, "Bill"—Bill wasn't his name, but it'll do—"Bill, where did I see that six-foot vase, made out of a single ruby?"
An' Bill would turn pale an' say, "It was in the secret vault of the Em'prer of Chince, your Excellency." Then Monte Cristo, he'd say, "Ah, yes, so it was. 'Tell, go an' get it an' have it here by the twenty-fifth day of next month."
Well, Bill, he'd just about flicker out, an' begin to tell how it couldn't be did; but Xlonte, he'd only look at him cold, an' say, "Never mind the details, Bill—get the vase. If you think you need the British Navy, why, buy it, but don't bother me. It seems to me, Bill, 'at you ought to begin gittin' on to my curves purty soon. Good-bye."
This was the way he carried on. He'd go to a prison an' he'd say, "Young man, you was buried to death when you was a baby, but I figgered I could use you later on, so I had you transplanted. You come out o' this prison, get an edication, an' on the ninth o' next June you show up at number forty-nine, Rue de Champaign, Paris, at two fifteen P. M.—sharp. Here's a million francs to pay expenses. Don't be a tight-wad—the's plenty more." A franc is worth five dollars, but he didn't give a durn for 'em. That was HIS style.
He'd come to town an' buy a tenement house 'at wouldn't rent, because it was haunted; an' he'd tear it all down except the rooms 'at had been most popular to commit murder in. Then next day he'd run up a swell mansion around these rooms—big an' gorgeous, like the Capitol at Cheyenne, with full-grown trees from all over the world, standin' in the front yard. Then he 'd give a party to all the substantial citizens who had once used those rooms to commit murders in, an' he'd bring 'em face to face with the ones they thought they had murdered—an' it was comical to see 'em fallin' around in faints; but Monte, he'd pretend 'at he hadn't noticed anything unusual, an' he'd get 'em a glass of wine an' make 'em face the torture, till it gives a feller a cold sweat, just to read about it.
You might think that a man runnin' for congress in this country has a hard time sinkin' his reputation; but the way 'at Monte Cristo mined around in a feller's past was enough to scare a cat out of a cellar. They don't run things over in France like they do here; they make Counts an' Markusses an' Bankers out of the bad men, an' slap the innocent ones into dungeons to keep 'em from gettin' spoilt. But this didn't suit Monte for a minute; so when he gets the gang all settin' up in front of him like a herd o' tenpins he sez, "Let her go!" an' you ought to have seen 'em drop.
He don't do none o' the dirty work himself—no more prisons for him. He just goes around like a Sunday-school director at Christmas time, while his enemies turn to an' poison an' stab an' mutilate each other in a way to turn a butcher pale; but his favorite plan is to make 'em go insane an' have their hair turn white in a single night. That got to be his private brand.
Well, Hammy read the book to us so natural that we all slept in one bed for company; but it cheered us a heap, an' we begun to feel rich, ourselves, an' talked about millions as easy an' natural as though we each had little holler islands of our own. Miller was about my size, so 'at all his clothes fit me like the skin on a potato. Hammy was a leetle too tall an' thin, and Locals, a foot or so short; but they fished out a couple of swell outfits too.
We found a lot of empty check-books, an' used to play draw, settlin' at night by check. It was purty good fun for a while—until we woke up. Hammy owed me ten million francs an' Locals was into me for fifteen. I offered to give 'em a receipt in full if they'd give me their interest in the yeller pup. As long as the pup had three bosses he wouldn't mind no one, an' I wanted to teach him somethin' besides eatin' an' sleepin; but them two cusses wouldn't sell out at the price. When I saw that a hundred an' twenty-five million dollars wouldn't buy two-thirds of a seventy-five cent pup, I understood what the spell-binders mean by a debased currency, an' I felt hurt an' lonesome again.