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W. C. Fields
years to come, Fields always apologized for the unimaginative quality of his meat thefts. He preferred to dwell on a system he devised for robbing Chinamen. Because he lived in the headquarters of a populous club, his whereabouts became known to all the members, and he enlisted their aid on occasion. A popular sport, conceived by Fields during a night when the smithy rats were making things too warm for sleep, involved the use of one confederate. The friend would stand on a streetcar track in front of a laundry, and an oncoming car would set up a peevish clangs ing. When the noise was sufficient to drown out the Chinaman's bell, Fields would dash in and clean out his till. The system was nearly perfect, since immigrant Chinamen then spoke little English and few Philadelphia police were well grounded in Chinese. A fast boy could manage a neat start, and Fields was uncommonly fleet.
In the daytime, Wheeler's forge kept the barn warm, but toward midnight a chill settled on the Orlando Social Club. Fields spent the first few nights sleeping on the floor, then he removed a door and padded one side with burlap. As a bed, it had shortcomings, but it was, he felt, softer and much cleaner than anything available in the brotherhood's country place. So severe were the frequent cold snaps that Fields often strayed from the forge to seek shelter elsewhere. For a while he was lodged in a livery stable, occupying a Percheron's bran trough. He spent one cramped month in a barrel. A bartender let him sleep a few nights in a heated saloon ; his bed was a stack of newspapers on the floor of a toilet. This reservation was canceled by the saloon owner, who became fretful about the authorities. "The kid's in there drinking whisky all night," he told the bartender. "They'll close us up." Fields always denied this stoutly. The truth is that he never touched alcohol in this period, though his public utterances on the subject were afterward frivolous. "I never drank anything
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