“You are learning, Kid. That’s precisely what I intended doing. Mary is safe, and moreover she’ll give me more than I could get around here. The expense of going to her is money spent insuring ourselves against trouble. If I try to drop the stones here, I have to take what the first man offers me or I make a dangerous enemy right there. If I refuse to be robbed and turn down half a dozen offers, I make that many bad friends, and they whisper me into jail. I could give them to some crooked saloon man, who would sell them in an hour and pay me at the rate of five or ten dollars a day, in the hope that before I got all the money I would get pinched for something else, and put away where I couldn’t collect the balance. If I get insistent and demand it all at once, he throws a scare into me thus: ‘Say, now, what’re you trying to do, crowd somebody? If I wanted to be wrong I could turn you in to the coppers and get a favor of them sometime. But I’m right. Nevertheless, don’t try to crowd me, see?’

“So I am for Salt Chunk Mary’s in the morning. She’s righter than a golden guinea and is entitled to make the profit on the junk. I’ll be back in ten days.