The boat
meets 'em--Lord knows what the party at the oars thought--they climbs in
an' the last I sees of 'em they was puttin' for shore--each havin' taken
a oar from the boatman, an' they sure was makin' that boat _hum_.
"Well, we sails away eventually without 'em; an' a year or more
afterward I crosses their trail again in Cy Ryder's office in 'Frisco."
"Did you ask them about it all?" said I.
"Mister Man," observed Bunt. "I'm several kinds of a fool; I know it.
But sometimes I'm wise. I wishes for to live as long as I can, an' die
when I can't help it. I does _not_, neither there, nor thereafterward,
ever make no joke, nor yet no alloosion about, or concerning the
Signorita Esperanza Palachi in the hearin' o' Hardenberg an' Strokher.
I've seen--(ye remember)--both those boys use their fists--an' likewise
Hardenberg, as he says hisself, shoots with both hands."
THE DUAL PERSONALITY OF SLICK DICK NICKERSON
I.
On a certain morning in the spring of the year, the three men who were
known as the Three Black Crows called at the office of "The President of
the Pacific and Oriental Flotation Company," situated in an obscure
street near San Francisco's water-front. They were Strokher, the tall,
blond, solemn, silent Englishman; Hardenberg, the American, dry of
humour, shrewd, resourceful, who bargained like a Vermonter and sailed a
schooner like a Gloucester cod-fisher; and in their company, as ever
inseparable from the other two, came the little colonial, nicknamed, for
occult reasons, "Ally Bazan," a small, wiry man, excitable, vociferous,
who was without fear, without guile and without money.
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