charitable lady told them to await her return as she had left her purse
in her bed room, located on the second floor. Never suspecting that boys
appealing for assistance would turn into ingrates, she left the front
door ajar. The next moment Jim almost sank to the floor when he saw
Danny sneak into the house, enter the nearest room, and just as the lady
descended the stairs, dart back to his former place upon the porch,
holding a silver spoon in his hand, which he hid in his pocket. After
the lady had paid him for a needle case they left.

Danny repeated this disgraceful trick of basest ingratitude at several
other houses. Then he coaxed Jim into making the lying appeal necessary
to sell the needle cases, and whenever Jim managed to make a sale
Danny's praises knew no bounds. Finally Danny had just one needle case
left out of the stock Jocko had handed to him to peddle, and while they
waited before the open entrance door of a palatial residence for the
return of the lady of the house, who had left them to find her
pocketbook, and whose footfalls they could hear as she descended the
stairway leading into the basement of her home, Danny deliberately
pushed the unsuspecting Jim through the half-open door into the hall of
the mansion, and told him in a whisper that if he did not steal
something he "would tell Kansas Shorty."

In all his past life Jim had never stolen a single cent's worth of other
people's property, but with Danny threatening to tell Kansas Shorty
should he refuse to do as told, and remembering the cruel pounding he
had received at the hands of this fiend only such a short time before,
and the warning ere he and Danny set out upon their begging trip to do
exactly as Danny ordered, he realized that perhaps another far more
brutal beating would be his should he disobey Danny's command.