once and sent it in about animals that he had seen caught in a trap lots of times. Loeb must have read it ‘triplets,’ instead of ‘trap lots,’ and sent the photo. Anyhow, it was useful to us to show people as a guarantee of good faith.
“Me and Andy never cared much to do business in New York. It was too much like pothunting. Catching suckers in that town, is like dynamiting a Texas lake for brass. All you have to do anywhere between the North and East rivers is to stand in the street with an open bag marked, ‘Drop packages of money here. No checks or loose bills taken.’ You have a cop handy to club pikers who try to chip in post office orders and Canadian money, and that’s all there is to New York for a hunter who loves his profession. So me and Andy used to just nature fake the town. We’d get out our spyglasses and watch the woodcocks along the Broadway swamps putting plaster casts on their broken legs, and then we’d sneak away without firing a shot.
“One day in the papier mâché palm room of a chloral hydrate and hops agency in a side street about eight inches off Broadway me and Andy had thrust upon us the acquaintance of a New Yorker. We had beer together until we discovered that each of us knew a man named Hellsmith, traveling for a stove
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