“By the way, Tom, did you go up to that Bertillon room?” Joe is off on a new tack.
“Oh, yes. I did all the regular stunts.”
“Were you measured and photographed, and all that?”
“Yes, and my finger prints taken. I went through the whole thing.”
“Gee! Well, then, they’ll have your picture in the rogues’ gallery, won’t they, along with the rest of us?”
“I suppose they will,” is my answer, and then I tell how my scars and marks were all discovered and duly set down in the record; and wind up with a variation of the same mild joke which so bored the clerk of the Bertillon room. “And do you know, boys, after he had got me all sized up and written down, I felt as if it would never be safe for me to adopt burglary as a profession; and I’ve always rather looked forward to that.”
My companions are not bored but appreciative, they laugh with some heartiness. Then after a pause Joe says quite seriously, “Well say, Tom! I can just tell you one thing, you needn’t ever have any fear that your house will be entered!”
“Oh! Do you think the crooks will all recognize me as one of themselves?”
“Sure!” is Joe’s hearty rejoinder. He evidently considers it a compliment, and I accept it as such. At any rate I have apparently hit upon rather a novel form of burglary insurance.
It must be somewhere between half past one and two o’clock that sheer exhaustion sends me off to sleep again. This time my slumber is more successful than before. It is only occasionally that the discomfort of the hard floor forces me back into consciousness, and forces me also to such changes of position as seem necessary to prevent my bones coming through. Many of them seem to be getting painfully near the surface.