"No," he said, his eyes fixed on the cigarette he had just rolled with Curly’s tobacco and paper. "I was pinched the minute I got here; Quinn and some flatty--and I fed the crummers all last night in the boob. This morning Bostwick give me orders."
"No, I was waiting to see you. I’ve got to get to work. Got anything now?"
"Well, Ted and me have a couple of marks--a jug and a p. o."
"Oh, out in the jungle--several of the tribes have filled it out."
"Not now," Curly said, shaking his head; "the old stool-pigeon’s out--she’s a mile high these nights."
A reminiscent smile passed lightly over Curly’s face, and he flecked the ash from his cigarette.
"Phillie Dave’s out,"--and then he remembered that Archie had never known the thief who had been proselyted by the police and been one of a numerous company of such men to turn detective, and so had bequeathed his name as a synonym for the moon. "But you never knew him, did you?"
"Dave--Phillie Dave we call him; he really belonged to the cat--he’s become a copper. He was before your time."
They chatted a little while, and as the noise in the bar-room increased, Curly said:
"You can’t hang out here. Those hoosiers are likely to start something any minute--we’ll have to lam."
They did not show themselves in the bar-room again. Some young smart Alecks from the country were there, flushed with beer and showing off. Curly and Archie left by a side door, walked hurriedly to the canal, dodged along its edges to the river, then along the wharves to the long bridge up stream, and over to the west side, and at four o’clock, after a wide detour through quiet streets, they gained Sam Gray’s at last.
Sam Gray kept a quiet saloon, with a few rooms upstairs for lodgers. Gray was a member of a family noted in the under world; his brothers kept similar places in other cities. His wife was a Rawson, a famous family of thieves, at the head of which was old Scott Rawson, who owned a farm and was then in hiding somewhere with an enormous reward hanging over his head. Gray’s wife was a sister of Rawson; and the sister, too, of Nan Rawson, whom Snuffer Wilson had in mind when, on the scaffold, he said, "Tell Nan good-by for me." And in these saloons, kept by the Rawsons and the Grays, and at the Rawson farm, thieves in good standing were always welcome; many a hunted man had found refuge there; the Rawsons would have care of him, and nurse him back to health of the wounds inflicted by official bullets.