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“‘Wait,’ he says, ‘don’t go yet. Look yonder,’ he says, pointing up Main Street on the other side. ‘Read that sign,’ he says.

“I looks and reads, and it says on a front window; ‘Undertaking and Emba’ming In All Its Branches.‘

“I rallies a little. ‘Son boy,’ I says, ‘you certainly are one thoughtful little guy–but can’t you take a joke? I talk about passing away, and before I get the words out of my pore exhausted vacant frame you begin to pick out the fun’el director. What’s your rush?’ I says. ‘Can’t you wait for the remains?’

“‘Keep ca’m,’ he says, ‘and look again. Your first look wasn’t a success. I don’t mean the undertaker’s,’ he says; ‘I mean the place next door beyond. It’s a delicatessen dump,’ he says, ‘containing cold grub all ready to be et without tools,’ he says. ‘And what’s more,’ he says, ‘the worthy delicatessener is engaged at this present moment in locking up and going away from here. In about a half an hour,’ he says, ‘he’ll be setting in his happy German-American home picking his teeth after supper, and reading comic jokes to his little son August out of the Fleagetty Bladder. And shortly thereafter,’ he says, ‘what’ll you and me be doing? We’ll be there, in that vittles emporium, in the midst of plenty,’ he says, ‘filling our midsts with plenty of plenty. That’s what we’ll be doing,’ he says.

“‘Sweet Caps,’ I says, reviving slightly, remember who we are? Remember the profession which we adorn? Would you,’ I says, ‘sink to burglary?’

“‘Scandalous,’ he says, with feeling, ‘I’m so hollow I could sink about three feet without touching nothing whatsoever. Death before dishonor, but not death by quick starvation. Are you with me,’ he says, ‘or ain’t you?’

“Well, what could you say to an argument like that? Nothing, not a syllable. So eventually night ensoos. And purty soon the little stars come softly out and at the same juncture me and the Sweet Caps Kid goes in. We goes into an alley behind that row of shops and after feeling about in the darkness for quite a spell and falling over a couple of fences and a lurking wheelbarrow and one thing and another, we finds a back window with a weak latch on it and we pries it open and we crawls in.

“Only, just as we gits inside all nice and snug, Sweet Caps he has to go and turn over a big long box that’s standing up on end, and down it comes ker-blim! making a most hideous loud noise.

“Then we hears somebody upstairs run across the floor over our heads and hears ’em pile down the steps, which is built on the outside of the building to save building ’em on the inside of the building, and in about a half a minute a fire bell or some similar appliance down the street a piece begins to ring its head off.

“‘The stuff’s off,’ says Sweet Caps to me in a deep, skeered whisper. ‘Let’s beat it.’

“‘Nix,’ I says. ‘You fasten that there window! I’m too weak to run now, and if they’ll give me about five minutes among the vittles I’ll be too full to run. Either way,’ I says, ‘it’s pinch, and,’ I says, ‘we’d better face it on a full stomach, than an empty one.’

“‘But they’ll have the goods on us,’ he says.

“‘Son,’ I says, ‘if they’ll only hang back a little we’ll have the goods in us. They won’t have no trouble proving the corpus delicatessen,’ I says, ‘–not if they bring a stomach pump along. Bar that window,’ I says, ‘and let joy be unconfined.’

“So he fastens her up from the inside, and while we hears the aroused and infuriated populace surrounding the place and getting ready to begin to think about making up their minds to advance en massy, I pulls down the front shades and strikes a match and lights up a coal-oil lamp and reaches round for something suitable to take the first raw edge off my appetite–such as a couple of hams.

“Then right off I sees where we has made a fatal mistake, and my heart dies within me and I jest plum collapses and folds up inside of myself like a concertina. And that explains,” he concluded, “why you ain’t seen me for going on the last eighteen months.”

“Did they give you eighteen months for breaking into the delicatessen shop?” I asked.

Mr. Doolan fetched a long, deep, mournful sigh.

“No,” he said simply, “they gave us eighteen months for breaking into the undertaker’s next door.”