That was a little grocery on one of the streets off the highway, railroad track, and rabbit run in the middle of town. But when I had the stuff sacked, and was tiptoeing out, Buck called. There were shots, and bullets went past my head. I ran so hard that when the three of us met, in a jungle by the water tank, I couldn’t talk for an hour. We cooked our grub and ate it, but figured the time had come for another change of states and hopped the U.P. for Las Vegas. There, after making two dollars parking cars in a lot on Fifth Street, I took a fifty-cent room in a motel near by, washed, shaved, and looked myself over. In the face, I looked what I was, a hard, sun-baked bum. On clothes, I looked good enough, though not quite good enough to sign in under my own name. Ever since Atlanta, in all missions, flophouses, and joints, I had used some phony monicker, like Dikes or Davis, and that’s what I did now. I went out and tried my luck on the wheels. I bought a dollar’s worth of ten-cent chips at a cut-rate place, and tried a few passes, red against the black.
