The restaurant was deserted. I joined him at a back table, where he sat cleaning a row of water glasses. Blowing his breath into one, like a housewife with a lamp chimney, he polished it carefully with a soiled napkin. “Did you score?” he inquired.

“Yes,” I said.

I spread my money on the table to look it over. My sad experience with the twenty-dollar bill had made me careful. The paper money looked safe enough, and so did the silver except one fifty-cent piece that was worn smooth and had a monogram engraved on one side of it⁠—a pocket piece or keepsake.

“Take this out in the back and throw it away,” I said to him; “it’s deadly poison.”

Instead, he rang it up on the register, saying, “That will pay your check; no use wasting it. It will go to the bank in the morning.”