Читать книгу Twenty Years a Detective in the Wickedest City in the World - Clifton R. Wooldridge - Страница 87

"I don't find all these suckers in the day coaches—not on your life. I found two pretty boys in the smoking room of a sleeping car a week ago, and I had $7.50 from one of them and $5 from the other, and they didn't know a line about it till they got together after I had gone.

"Friends of mine have kicked because I get $2, or $3, or $4 apiece for gold-rimmed spectacles that cost me $1.80 a dozen. But where is the kick. I know men who have paid $10 or $15 for glasses from an oculist when the glass was cut out of a broken window pane. I save such people money, don't I?

"I am not out after the old farmer with hayseed in his hair and leaf tobacco in his mouth, chewing. There are a lot of gay chaps traveling these days who think they've got the bulge on the train butcher by a sort of birthright or something. They are after me, sometimes, till I can't go to sleep after I come in from a run. For instance, the other day a chap got into the train out of a little country town, intending to go to another little town twenty miles away without change of cars. He had $2 cash and a guitar when he got on the train, but I had both when he got off. He wasn't mad at all; he just didn't understand it. For that reason I'll see him again one of these days, and he will buck the game harder than he did the first time. The trouble is he wants to vindicate himself; he's one of these smart alecs that you couldn't down with a crowbar—he don't think!