Reaching down with my right hand I got the poke and tore my left hand out of its trap, leaving a piece of skin the size of a half dollar behind. There were three exits and we all got out safely in the scramble, and weighed in at my room.

Frank was there ahead of us. My grab yielded two thousand dollars in bills. The chap at the dice game put his hand on a stack of twenty twenty-dollar gold pieces, but it was too heavy and he fumbled it, getting only half. Our assistant at the roulette wheel got a couple of stacks of silver only.

The money was split at once, and our friends departed. Frank took most of our money out and left it with a saloon man we knew. I stayed in my room a couple of days waiting for my hand to heal.

One great failing of the thief is that when he gets money he immediately makes tracks for some hangout where he throws a few dollars on the bar just to “give the house a tumble” and let them guess where he scored and how much he got.

He looks wise, says nothing, spends a few dollars, and goes out. Then the guessing begins and it’s surprising what good guessers some poor thieves are.

Frank insisted that we go downtown a few nights later. I took the bandage off my hand and went along. We dropped into Billy the Mug’s, bought a few drinks, and departed. Half a block away we were pounced on by a couple of “dicks.” One of them jerked my left hand out of my coat pocket where I had been keeping it to conceal the skinned place. “That’s enough,” he said, looking at it. They marched us down to the gambling house and showed us to the game keepers. They got no satisfaction there, the gamblers either could not or would not identify us. We were then taken down to the city can, where they searched us thoroughly, finding nothing but a few dollars in silver. We were questioned separately and together, but refused to talk⁠—a guilty man’s only refuge. The officers ordered the man on the desk to put us on the “small book,” meaning to hold us as suspicious characters. “Maybe Corbett can get something out of you,” one of them said to us as they were leaving.