Johnnie was a typical knight of the road. He believed that beds were for sick people in hospitals, that room rent was wild extravagance, and paying fare on the railroad nothing but ostentatious spending. He protested.

“Sanc, you’re not going to start paying fare?”

“Yes, I am, and I’ll buy you a ticket to California if you’ll come. Just look at the pleasure you would have beating your way from there back to your hometown in New Hampshire.”

“That’s the funny part of it,” said Johnnie. “My hometown is twenty miles off the railroad and I always have to pay fare on the stage going in and out.”

Back at Pocatello we paid Mary the borrowed money, and spent some in her place for interest. She gladly undertook to deliver the money we wanted to go to our friends at the prison, and we gave it to her, capable woman that she was, feeling as sure they would get it as if we were doing it ourselves.

Mary bought or sold anything crooked. Johnnie paid her for a couple of guns and gave her an address in Chicago to express them to. He could have bought them cheaper there, but in the matter of buying guns he was careful. Mary was square, and no matter what happened, she would not talk.

“Be sure and get thirty-eight caliber, Mary,” he cautioned. “I won’t have any off calibers or strange make of guns. I want the kind that everybody else has. I don’t want to shoot anybody, but if I do they won’t dig a forty-one caliber slug out of him and find a forty-one caliber gun on me.”

We parted at Pocatello, agreeing to “weigh in” (meet) at Ogden in the spring; Johnnie starting home, where he never arrived, and we to the Coast.