I was spying out from under the shade of my
hat brim, searching the floor for leather. It took me a
long time, and I begun to think maybe my guess was
wrong, but at last I struck it. It laid over by the
bulkhead, and was nearly the color of the carpet. It
was a little round plug about as thick as the end of your
little finger, and I says to myself there's a di'mond in
the nest you've come from. Before long I spied out
the plug's mate .
"Think of the smartness and coolness of that
blatherskite! He put up that scheme on us and
reasoned out what we would do, and we went ahead
and done it perfectly exact, like a couple of pudd'n-
heads. He set there and took his own time to un-
screw his heelplates and cut out his plugs and stick in
the di'monds and screw on his plates again . He
allowed we would steal the bogus swag and wait all
night for him to come up and get drownded, and by
George it's just what we done! I think it was power-
ful smart."
"You bet your life it was!" says Tom, just full of
admiration.
CHAPTER IV.
THE THREE SLEEPERS
WELL, all day we went through the humbug of
watching one another, and it was pretty sickly
business for two of us and hard to act out, I can tell
you. About night we landed at one of them little
Missouri towns high up toward Iowa, and had supper
at the tavern, and got a room upstairs with a cot and a
double bed in it, but I dumped my bag under a deal
table in the dark hall while we was moving along it to
bed, single file, me last, and the landlord in the lead
with a tallow candle.
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