“No. An outside man would only attract the cops. I’ll plant inside before the place closes and get out some way after I get the coin.”

Johnnie didn’t even waste fifty cents for a hammer. He found one in the stage carpenter’s kit. He got something over a thousand dollars, all in gold, and I persuaded him to let me buy tickets to Sacramento, where I exchanged it for paper money. We got “under” a night passenger train and held it into Truckee, where we spent a few days fishing and drinking mickies of alcohol with some congenial bums we found by the river. The weather was fine, and we journeyed through Nevada on slow freight trains, sitting in the open side door of a clean boxcar, with our legs dangling outside, looking for the scenery.