the notes to my pocket, and, if I had, it would not have altered the
situation later. Only the other day McKnight put this very thing up
to me.

"I warned you," he reminded me. "I told you there were queer things
coming, and to be on your guard. You ought to have taken your
revolver."

"It would have been of exactly as much use as a bucket of snow in
Africa," I retorted. "If I had never closed my eyes, or if I had
kept my finger on the trigger of a six-shooter (which is novelesque
for revolver), the result would have been the same. And the next
time you want a little excitement with every variety of thrill
thrown in, I can put you by way of it. You begin by getting the
wrong berth in a Pullman car, and end--"

"Oh, I know how it ends," he finished shortly. "Don't you suppose
the whole thing's written on my spinal marrow?"

But I am wandering again. That is the difficulty with the
unprofessional story-teller: he yaws back and forth and can't keep
in the wind; he drops his characters overboard when he hasn't any
further use for them and drowns them; he forgets the coffee-pot and
the frying-pan and all the other small essentials, and, if he carries
a love affair, he mutters a fervent "Allah be praised" when he lands
them, drenched with adventures, at the matrimonial dock at the end
of the final chapter.

I put in a thoroughly unsatisfactory afternoon. Time dragged
eternally. I dropped in at a summer vaudeville, and bought some