“Look here, that Mayne kid’s dead right.  It’s you good guys that are to blame.  We little bad ones see you kowtowing to the big worse ones, and we get to thinking we can come in under the wires easy winners, too.  However, let me tell you something while I’m in the humor to gas.  It’s this:  sooner or later everybody gets theirs.  My sort and Inglesby’s sort, we all get ours.  Duck and twist and turn and sidestep all we want, at the end it’s right there waiting for us, with a loaded billy up its sleeve:  Ours! Some fine day when we’re looking the other way, thinking we’ve even got it on the annual turnout of the cops up Broadway for class, why, Ours gets up easy on its hind legs, spits on its mitt, and hands us exactly what’s coming to us, biff! and we wake up sitting on our necks in the middle of day-before-yesterday and year-after-next.  I got mine.  If I was you I wouldn’t be too cock-sure that kid don’t give Inglesby his, some of these days, good and plenty.”

“Maybe so,” said I, cautiously.

“Gee, that’d be fly-time for all the good guys in this tank, wouldn’t it?” he grinned.  “Sure!  I can see ’em now, patting the bump on their beams where they think the brain-patch sprouts, and handing out hunks of con to the Lord about his being right on his old-time job of swatting sinners in their dinners.  Yet they’ll all of them go right on leading themselves up to be trimmed by the very next holdup that’s got the nerve to do them!  Friend, believe a goat when he tells you that you stillwater-and-greenpasture sheep are some bag of nuts!”

“Thank you,” said I, with due meekness.

“Keep the change,” said he, unabashed.  “I wasn’t meaning you, anyhow.  I’ve got more manners, I hope, than to do such.  And, parson, you don’t need to have cold feet about young Mayne.  If you ask me, I’d bet the limit on him.  Why, I think so much of that boy that if he was a rooster I’d put the gaffs and my last dollar on him, and back him to whip everything in feathers clean up to baldheaded eagles.  Believe me, he’d do it!” he finished, with enthusiasm.

Bewildered by a mental picture of a Laurence with ruffled neck-feathers and steel spurs, I hurriedly changed the subject to the saner and safer one of our own immediate affairs.

“Yep, ten orders in to-day’s mail and seven in yesterday’s; and good orders for the wasp-moths, single or together, and that house in New York wants steady supplies from now on.  And here’s a fancy shop wants a dozen trays, like that last one I finished.  We’re looking up,” said he, complacently.

The winter that followed was a trying one, and the Guest Rooms were never empty.  I like to record that John Flint put his shoulder to the wheel and became Madame’s right hand man and Westmoreland’s faithful ally.  His wooden leg made astonishingly little noise, and his entrance into a room never startled the most nervous patient.  He went on innumerable errands, and he performed countless small services that in themselves do not seem to amount to much, but swell into a great total.