You decide he is about half drunk. He takes his hat off and throws it out of your line of vision, probably at the dresser. Now he turns around, goes to the door, and kicks it shut with a bang. Back in the middle of his room he puts a fat hand in his capacious pants pocket and comes up with a small roll of paper money. He unrolls the bills, looking at them with a mysterious smile on his fat face. You don’t understand his smile and wonder if he is thinking how he cheated somebody in a poker game; he looks like a gambler.

The roll interests you, the outside one is what you call a “salmon belly.” It is a yellowback⁠—a big bill. The fat man now gets a chair and places it directly in front of his window, but instead of sitting down he stands up on it unsteadily. You get alarmed and watch him intently. Surely he’s not going to jump out? No, he takes the string and pulls the curtain halfway down. All you can see of him now is his bulky midsection. The upper part of him is silhouetted against the curtain. He raises one hand above his head, the hand that holds the bills. You can see its blurred shadow as he runs it along the roller at the top of the curtain. He takes hold of one edge of the curtain now, pulls it down a little till the ratchet is released, and lets it go up with a rattle and bang. He puts both hands on the windowsill to steady himself as he gets off the chair.

He is still smiling, but there’s no mystery about it now. You sit in your room not fifteen feet away, open-mouthed in amazed admiration. What a fox he is, to roll his money up in the curtain! What a plant! What chance would a prowler have of finding his money?