“If you can’t pay—­play,” I says.

“I can’t play,” says he.

“Then learn right off quick,” says I, letting him smell the end of my gun-barrel.

He caught hold of the harp, turned red as a beet, and commenced to blow.  He blew a dinky little tune I remembered hearing when I was a kid: 

   Prettiest little gal in the country—­oh! 
   Mammy and Daddy told me so.

I made him keep on playing it all the time we were in the car.  Now and then he’d get weak and off the key, and I’d turn my gun on him and ask what was the matter with that little gal, and whether he had any intention of going back on her, which would make him start up again like sixty.  I think that old boy standing there in his silk hat and bare feet, playing his little French harp, was the funniest sight I ever saw.  One little red-headed woman in the line broke out laughing at him.  You could have heard her in the next car.

Then Jim held them steady while I searched the berths.  I grappled around in those beds and filled a pillow-case with the strangest assortment of stuff you ever saw.  Now and then I’d come across a little pop-gun pistol, just about right for plugging teeth with, which I’d throw out the window.  When I finished with the collection, I dumped the pillow-case load in the middle of the aisle.  There were a good many watches, bracelets, rings, and pocket-books, with a sprinkling of false teeth, whiskey flasks, face-powder boxes, chocolate caramels, and heads of hair of various colours and lengths.  There were also about a dozen ladies’ stockings into which jewellery, watches, and rolls of bills had been stuffed and then wadded up tight and stuck under the mattresses.  I offered to return what I called the “scalps,” saying that we were not Indians on the war-path, but none of the ladies seemed to know to whom the hair belonged.

One of the women—­and a good-looker she was—­wrapped in a striped blanket, saw me pick up one of the stockings that was pretty chunky and heavy about the toe, and she snapped out: 

“That’s mine, sir.  You’re not in the business of robbing women, are you?”

Now, as this was our first hold-up, we hadn’t agreed upon any code of ethics, so I hardly knew what to answer.  But, anyway, I replied:  “Well, not as a specialty.  If this contains your personal property you can have it back.”

“It just does,” she declared eagerly, and reached out her hand for it.

“You’ll excuse my taking a look at the contents,” I said, holding the stocking up by the toe.  Out dumped a big gent’s gold watch, worth two hundred, a gent’s leather pocket-book that we afterward found to contain six hundred dollars, a 32-calibre revolver; and the only thing of the lot that could have been a lady’s personal property was a silver bracelet worth about fifty cents.

I said:  “Madame, here’s your property,” and handed her the bracelet.  “Now,” I went on, “how can you expect us to act square with you when you try to deceive us in this manner?  I’m surprised at such conduct.”