“Well, sir, it took Bird City just ten minutes to realize that it was in a cage.  We expected trouble; but there wasn’t any.  The citizens saw that we had ’em.  The nearest railroad was thirty miles away; and it would be two weeks at least before the river would be fordable.  So they began to cuss, amiable, and throw down dollars on the bar till it sounded like a selection on the xylophone.

“There was about 1,500 grown-up adults in Bird City that had arrived at years of indiscretion; and the majority of ’em required from three to twenty drinks a day to make life endurable.  The Blue Snake was the only place where they could get ’em till the flood subsided.  It was beautiful and simple as all truly great swindles are.

“About ten o’clock the silver dollars dropping on the bar slowed down to playing two-steps and marches instead of jigs.  But I looked out the window and saw a hundred or two of our customers standing in line at Bird City Savings and Loan Co., and I knew they were borrowing more money to be sucked in by the clammy tendrils of the octopus.

“At the fashionable hour of noon everybody went home to dinner.  We told the bartenders to take advantage of the lull, and do the same.  Then me and Andy counted the receipts.  We had taken in $1,300.  We calculated that if Bird City would only remain an island for two weeks the trust would be able to endow the Chicago University with a new dormitory of padded cells for the faculty, and present every worthy poor man in Texas with a farm, provided he furnished the site for it.

“Andy was especial inroaded by self-esteem at our success, the rudiments of the scheme having originated in his own surmises and premonitions.  He got off the safe and lit the biggest cigar in the house.

[Illustration:  “Andy was especial inroaded by self-esteem.”]

“‘Jeff,’ says he, ’I don’t suppose that anywhere in the world you could find three cormorants with brighter ideas about down-treading the proletariat than the firm of Peters, Satan and Tucker, incorporated.  We have sure handed the small consumer a giant blow in the sole apoplectic region.  No?’

“‘Well,’ says I, ’it does look as if we would have to take up gastritis and golf or be measured for kilts in spite of ourselves.  This little turn in bug juice is, verily, all to the Skibo.  And I can stand it,’ says I, ‘I’d rather batten than bant any day.’

“Andy pours himself out four fingers of our best rye and does with it as was so intended.  It was the first drink I had ever known him to take.

“‘By way of liberation,’ says he, ‘to the gods.’

“And then after thus doing umbrage to the heathen diabetes he drinks another to our success.  And then he begins to toast the trade, beginning with Raisuli and the Northern Pacific, and on down the line to the little ones like the school book combine and the oleomargarine outrages and the Lehigh Valley and Great Scott Coal Federation.