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I'll tell you it's this way: I sort of get to chewing on that infernal log of wood that's where my good leg used to grow and and splinters get into my temper and I've got to snarl or burst wide open! You'd growl like the devil yourself, if you had to try holding down my job for awhile, skypilot or no skypilot!" "Why I dare say I should," said I, contritely.
"Cut it out! Ain't I up against enough now, for God's sake? Down and out and nothing to do but have my soul curry-combed and mashfed by a skypilot with both his legs and all his mouth on him! Ain't it hell, though? Say, you better send for the cops. I'd rather stand for the pen than the preaching. What'd you do with my bag, anyway?"
She looked at him with genuine alarm this time. "That will do, Mandy," Douglas commanded, feeling an unwelcome drama gathering about his head. "Great Barnum and Bailey!" Polly exclaimed, looking at him as though he were the very last thing in the world she had ever expected to see. "Are you a skypilot?" "That's what he am, chile."
"Didn't you read the papers?" he wondered in his turn. "There don't many travel in my class, skypilot! Why, I haven't got any equals the best of them trail a mile behind. Ask the bulls, if you want to know about Slippy McGee! And I let the happy dust alone. Most dips are dopes, but I was too slick; I cut it out. I knew if the dope once gets you, then the bulls get next. Not for Slippy.
"Tell old Brassbound," said he, "to run in friend Skypilot if he gravitates near the post office." Mrs. Barraclough picked up the receiver and asked for the police station and while waiting to be connected remarked weakly: "There is no law to prevent people sending telegrams, dear." "Then we must make a few to fit the occasion." "Is that you, Mr.
"I never thought I'd be a-talkin' to one of you guys. What's your name?" "Douglas." He spoke shortly. "Ain't you got no handle to it?" "If you mean my Christian name, it's John." "Well, that sounds like a skypilot, all right. But you don't look like I s'posed they did." "Why not?" "I always s'posed skypilots was old and grouchy-like. You're a'most as good lookin' as our strong man."
"Maybe half of me might be, parson," he agreed, "but it's not safe for a skypilot to be caught owning a twin like the other half." "I'm pinning my faith to my half," said I, serenely. "Now, why?" he asked, with sudden fierceness. "I turn it over and over and over: it looks white on the outside, but I can't to save me figure out why you're doing it. Parson, what have you got up your sleeve?"
"That's all right," sulked Lanpher, then added, with a sudden flare of spite: "When I hired you as foreman I shore never expected to draw a skypilot full o' sermons into the bargain." "No?" drawled Alicran, looking hard at Lanpher. "I often wonder just what you did hire me for." On which Lanpher made no comment. "Yeah," resumed Alicran, the fish having failed to bite, "I often wonder about that.
His face contracted horribly, and of a sudden the sweat burst out upon it so blindingly that he had to put up an arm and wipe it away. For a moment he lay still, glaring, panting, helpless; while I stood and watched him unmoved. "Ain't you the real little Sherlock Holmes, though?" he jeered presently. "Got Old Sleuth skinned for fair and Nick Carter eating out of your hand! You damned skypilot!"
And then that mysterious, hidden self-under-self that lives in us far, far beneath thought and instinct and conscience and heredity and even consciousness itself, rose to the surface with a message: Slippy McGee had been the greatest cracksman in all America.... "Honest to God, skypilot, I can open any box made, easy as easy!" ... And even as his tools were hidden in St.
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