Un the "Sunday Herald")
"Absent-mindedness," I say, watching Alf hunting in his pockets for a pencil to help him pick the winner of the three-thirty, "absent-mindedness, Alf, causes an awful lot of trouble."
*Yes, Sam," says Alf, "the matches are on the table if that's what you want for your pipe."
Which is the way he always takes a pleasant remark, snapping it back at me, so to speak, specially if he's nothing else to do but wait for another train so as to be ready to tell me when to go and take the tickets, "What I mean," I adds, "is, did I ever tell you how a bit of absent-mindedness on my part caught the bloke who pinched Lady Haymarket's diamonds? The trouble he got was seven years,"
"No s Alf, "you didn't.
But what a tip Seven of Diamonds in the three o'clock instead, How about a bob each way, San "Bob each way nothing" I tell him. "You keep your bobs and your bobs'll keep you. That's what my misses says, and she's right for once, though it was because Í thought she was going wrong that I came all over absent-minded,"
Previous to Marriage It was just before we were married I explain to Alf, and naturally I feeling a bit worried. I was taking the tickets one morning, and there was quite a crowd at the barrier all thinking they were going to miss the train and pushing At the back there's a girl I think's like my Nancy, talking to a smart fellow, who seems a bit too fond of her for my liking, and even if it's not her, a bit too fond of her for public exhibition, And I'm looking at her to see if it is my Nancy and forgetting myself like, and when I look down I find Im holding on to a bick ticket and he's holding on to the other end and looking at the train and over his shoulder and back again, and when I let go he's off up the platform like a greyhound with the hare after him.
He is a tall, fair chap in a grey suit, and as' he goes off I see he's arrying a reddish-brown attache case.
"Funi I thinks, "most people'll make a complaint without a reason, and here's a chap got & reason and says nothing,"
But I'm not quarrelling with luck, specially as I see it wasn't Nancy after all, but a little bit of a thing that should have known better, so I pull myself together and get on with the job.
Well the crowd goes through, several people with platform tickets seeing off their friends like, and when the train goes out they come back, and among them the man in ihe grey suit. He hands me a platform ticket, I looks at it, see it is the right date, and that it's punched proper, and lets him go through. dt is none of my business if he changes his mind, though I wonder how he got the platform ticket.
"Not the Same Bloke"
But then I he has got no see reddish case, so I s to myself:
Sam Hathaway, Sam, you've been caught dreaming once this morning: perhaps it's not the same bloke" at ull" But I think no more about it.
Don't look for trouble always was my motto.
About half an hour later up come two detectives, There's been a burglary, they and it looks like being the work of a bloke they call "Tailor Jimmy," because he always looks like one of these things in a shop window.
But this Jimmy must have an accomplice, they explain, who is getting rid of the stuff for him, and they have an idea one or other or both of them has caught a train from the station, The clerk in the booking-office has told them something about seeing somebody like this "Jimmy" taking a ticket, though he can't remember where to. Anyway, he hasn't time
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.