Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: "Hands Up!" T)UD Barrows tipped the scales around two hun- dred — six feet, one inch, of solid bone and muscle. Likewise he drank, — hard liquor, — all the fifty-seven varieties and concoctions thereof, and he met all comers, — his friends, their friends, anybody's friends, — and eventually, on his way homeward, the weary-eyed wops going to work at day-break. All of which is to say that he was a "good fellow," "a regular guy" and a "sticker." Also it was his confirmed habit, whether plumb sober or genteely skished, — for Bud averred that no gentleman ever got really drunk, — not so long as he refrained from whispering to side-walks, — it was his confirmed habit upon ascending the brown-stone steps of the paternal domicile, to noiselessly open and carefully lock the front door behind him and then, after removing his shoes in the hall-way, to pussyfoot into the parlor and to equallycarefully secure and lock the window-catches against possible burglarous intrusion, — this at the behest of his most estimable but extremely nervous mater. Be it also set down for your edification that Bud resided on a very steep street, on Washington Heights, — a street paved, because of its steep grade, with rough stone blocks instead of the customary smooth asphalt. The relevancy of all of which seemingly incongruous statements may presently become more apparent. It is not restful or soothing to shattered nerves, to live on a steep street paved with stone blocks, be the nerves a mere fashionable ailment, as in the case of his mother, or real "Honest-to-God" jumpy nerves of the "morning-after" variety. The heavily-laden motor trucks, rumbling down or laboring up such a street, shake the houses to their very foundations and cause them to quiver from cellar to roof. Everything t...