and trinkets downstairs, and came back with sixteen
dollars. "The old scoundrel said the case was filled," he
said. "It's a lie, but he knows I want the money."

They divided up the spoils, and Jurgis got as his share
fifty-five dollars and some change. He protested that it
was too much, but the other had agreed to divide even.
That was a good haul, he said, better than the average.

When they got up in the morning, Jurgis was sent
out to buy a paper; one of the pleasures of committing
a crime was the reading about it afterward. "I had a
pal that always did it," Duane remarked, laughing --
"until one day he read that he had left three thousand
dollars in a lower inside pocket of his party's vest!"

There was a half-column account of the robbery -- it
was evident that a gang was operating in the neighbor~
hood, said the paper, for it was the third within a week,
and the police were apparently powerless. The victim
was an insurance agent, and he had lost a hundred and
ten dollars that did not belong to him. He had chanced
to have his name marked on his shirt, otherwise he would
not have been identified yet. His assailant had hit him
too hard, and he was suffering from concussion of the
brain; and also he had been half-frozen when found, and
would lose three fingers of his right hand. The enter~
prising newspaper reporter had taken all this information
to his family, and told how they had received it.

Since it was Jurgis's first experience, these details natu~
rally caused him some worriment; but the other laughed
coolly -- it was the way of the game, and there was no
helping it. Before long Jurgis would think no more of
it than they did in the yards of knocking out a bullock.
"It's a case of us or the other fellow, and I say the other
fellow every time," he observed.

"Still," said Jurgis, reflectively, "he never did us any
harm."

"He was doing it to somebody as hard as he could,
you can be sure of that," said his friend.

Duane had already explained to Jurgis that if a man of

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