“ ‘I must confess, Mr. Bassett,’ says Ricks, speaking near inaudible out of a slice of pie, ‘that at this immediate juncture I could not, perhaps, promote an enterprise to relieve the situation. Large operations, such as I direct, naturally require careful preparation in advance. I—’
“ ‘I know, Ricksy,’ breaks in Bill Bassett. ‘You needn’t finish. You need $500 to make the first payment on a blonde typist and four roomsful of quartered oak furniture. And you need $500 more for advertising contracts. And you need two weeks’ time for the fish to begin to bite. Your line of relief would be about as useful in an emergency as advocating municipal ownership to cure a man suffocated by eighty-cent gas. And your graft ain’t much swifter, Brother Peters,’ he winds up.
“ ‘Oh,’ says I, ‘I haven’t seen you turn anything into gold with your wand yet, Mr. Good Fairy. Most anybody could rub the magic ring for a little leftover victuals.’
“ ‘That was only getting the pumpkin ready,’ says Bassett, braggy and cheerful. ‘The coach and six’ll drive up to the door before you know it, Miss Cinderella. Maybe you’ve got some scheme under your sleeve-holders that will give us a start.’
“ ‘Son,’ says I, ‘I’m fifteen years older than you are, and young enough yet to take out an endowment policy. I’ve been broke before. We can see the lights of that town not half a mile away. I learned under Montague Silver, the greatest street man that ever spoke from a wagon. There are hundreds of men walking those streets this moment with grease spots on their clothes. Give me a gasoline lamp, a dry goods box, and a two-dollar bar of white castile soap, cut into little—’
“ ‘Where’s your two dollars?’ snickered Bill Bassett into my discourse. There was no use arguing with that burglar.
“ ‘No,’ he goes on, ‘you’re both babes-in-the-wood. Finance has closed the mahogany desk, and trade has put the shutters up. Both of you look to labor to start the wheels going. All right. You admit it. Tonight I’ll show you what Bill Bassett can do.’
“Bassett tells me and Ricks not to leave the cabin till he comes back, even if it’s daylight, and then he starts off toward town, whistling gay.
“This Alfred E. Ricks pulls off his shoes and his coat, lays a silk handkerchief over his hat, and lays down on the floor.
“ ‘I think I will endeavor to secure a little slumber,’ he squeaks. ‘The day has been fatiguing. Good night, my dear Mr. Peters.’
“ ‘My regards to Morpheus,’ says I. ‘I think I’ll sit up a while.’
“About two o’clock, as near as I could guess by my watch in Peavine, home comes our laboring man and kicks up Ricks, and calls us to the streak of bright moonlight shining in the cabin door. Then he spreads out five packages of one thousand dollars each on the floor, and begins to cackle over the nest egg like a hen.
“ ‘I’ll tell you a few things about that town,’ says he. ‘It’s named Rocky Springs, and they’re building a Masonic temple, and Judge Tucker’s wife, who has been down with pleurisy, is some better. I had a talk on these lilliputian thesises before I could get a siphon in the fountain of knowledge that I was after. And there’s a bank there called the Lumberman’s Fidelity and Plowman’s Savings Institution. It closed for business yesterday with $23,000 cash on hand. It will open this morning with $18,000 — all silver — that’s the reason I didn’t bring more. There you are, trade and capital. Now, will you be bad?’
“ ‘My young friend,’ says Alfred E. Ricks, holding up his hands, ‘have you robbed this bank? Dear me, dear me!’
“ ‘You couldn’t call it that,’ says Bassett. ‘ “Robbing” sounds harsh. All I had to do was to find out what street it was on. That town is so quiet that I could stand on the corner and hear the tumblers clicking in that safe lock — right to 45, left twice to 80, right once to 60, left to 15 — as plain as the Yale captain giving orders in the football dialect. Now, boys,’ says Bassett, ‘this is an early rising town. They tell me the citizens are all up and stirring before daylight. I asked what for and they said because breakfast was ready at that time. And what of merry Robin Hood? It must be Yoicks! and away with the tinkers’ chorus. I’ll stake you. How much do you want? Speak up, Capital.’
“ ‘My dear young friend,’ says this ground squirrel of a Ricks, standing on his hind legs and juggling nuts in his paws, ‘I have friends in Denver who would assist me. If I had a hundred dollars I—’
“Bassett unpins a package of the currency and throws five twenties to Ricks.
“ ‘Trade, how much?’ he says to me.
“ ‘Put your money up, Labor,’ says I. ‘I never yet drew upon honest toil for its hard-earned pittance. The dollars I get arc surplus ones that are burning the pockets of fools and greenhorns. When I stand on a street corner and sell a solid gold diamond ring to a yap for $3.00, I make just $2.60. And I know he’s going to give it to a girl in return for all the benefits accruing from a $125.00 ring. His profits are $122.00. Which of us is the biggest faker?’
“ ‘And when you sell a poor woman a pinch of sand for fifty cents to keep her lamp from exploding,’ says Bassett, ‘what do you figure her gross earnings to be, with sand at forty cents a ton?’
“ ‘Listen,’ says I. ‘I instruct her to keep her lamp clean and well filled. If she does that it can’t burst. And with the sand in it she knows it can’t and she don’t worry. It’s a kind of Industrial Christian Science. She pays fifty cents, and gets both Rockefeller and Mrs. Eddy on the job. It ain’t everybody that can let the gold-dust twins do their work.’
“Alfred E. Ricks all but licks the dust off of Bill Bassett’s shoes.
“ ‘My dear young friend,’ says he, ‘I will never forget your generosity. Heaven will reward you. But let me implore you to turn from your ways of violence and crime.’
“ ‘Mousie,’ says Bill, ‘the hole in the wainscoting for you. Your dogmas and inculcations sound to me like the last words of a bicycle pump. What has your high moral, elevator-service system of pillage brought you to? Penuriousness and warn. Even Brother Peters, who insists upon contaminating the art of robbery with theories of commerce and trade, admitted he was on the lift. Both of you live by the gilded rule. Brother Peters,’ says Bill, ‘you’d better choose a slice of this embalmed currency.’
“I told Bill Bassett once more to put his money in his pocket. I never had the respect for burglary that some people have. I always gave something for the money I took, even if it was only some little trifle of a souvenir to remind ’em not to get caught again.
“And then Alfred E. Ricks grovels at Bill’s feet again, and bids us adiсu. He says he will hire a team at a farmhouse, drive to the station below, and take the train for Denver. It salubrified the atmosphere when that lamentable bollworm took his departure. He was a disgrace to every non-industrial profession in the country. With all his big schemes and fine offices he had wound up unable even to get an honest meal, except by the kindness of a strange and maybe unscrupulous burglar.
“I was glad to see him go, though I felt a little sorry for him, now that he was ruined forever. What could such a man do without a big capital to work with? Why, Alfred E. Ricks, as we left him, was as helpless as a turtle on its back. He couldn’t have worked a scheme to beat a little girl out of a penny slate-pencil.
“When me and Bill Bassett was left alone I did a little sleight-of-mind turn in my head with a trade secret at the end of it. Thinks I, I’ll show this Mr. Burglar the difference between business and labor. He had hurt some of my professional self-adulation by casting his Persians upon commerce and trade.