"Worth 10,000"

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Title:     "Worth 10,000"
Author: Irvin S. Cobb [More Titles by Cobb]

You might have called Vincent C. Marr a self-made man and be making no mistake about it. For he was self-made; not merely self-assembled, as so many men are who attain distinction in this profession or that calling. Entirely through his own efforts, with only his native wit to light the way for him, he had pulled himself up, step by step, from the very bottom of his trade to the very top of it. His trade was the applied trade of crookedness; his pursuit the pursuit of other folks' cash resources. He had the envy and admiration of his friends in allied branches of the same general industry; he had the begrudged respect of his official enemies, the police; while his accomplishments--the tricks he pulled, the coups he scored, the purses he garnered--were discussed and praised by the human nits and lice of the Seamy Side, just as the achievements in a legitimate field of a Hill or a Schwab or a Rockefeller might be talked of among petty shopkeepers and little business men. He had, as the phrase goes, everything--imagination, resource, ingenuity, audacity, utter ruthlessness.

Yet it would seem hard to conceive a more humble beginning than his had been. His father was a cobbler in a little West Virginia coal town. At sixteen he ran away from home to go with a small circus. This circus was a traveling shield for all manner of rough extortioners. Card sharps, shell workers, petermen, sneak thieves, pickpockets, even burglars rode its train. They had a saying that the owner of this show sold the safe-blowing privileges outright but retained a one-third interest in the hold-up concession. That was a whimsical exaggeration of what perhaps had a kern of truth in it. Certainly it was the fact of the case that the owner depended more upon his lion's cut of the swag which the trailing jackals amassed than upon the intake at the ticket windows. Bad weather might kill his business for a week; a crop failure might lame it for a month; but the graft was as sure as anything graftified can be. When the runaway youth, Vince Marr, inserted himself beneath the protecting wing of this patron he knew exactly whither his ultimate ambitions tended. He had no vague boyish design to serve a 'prenticeship as stake driver or roustabout in the hope some day of graduating into a rider or a tumbler, a ringmaster or a clown. He joined out in order that among these congenial influences he might the quicker become an accomplished thief.

Starting as a novice he had to carve out his own little niche in company where the competition already was fierce. His rise, though, was rapid. So far as the records show he was the first of the Monday guys. He developed the line himself and gave to it its name. A Monday guy was a plunderer of clotheslines. He followed the route of the daily street parade; rather he followed a route running roughly parallel to it. He set out coincidentally with it and he aimed to have his pilfering stint finished when the parade was over. He prowled in alleys and skinned over back fences, progressing from house yard to house yard while the parade passed through the streets upon which the houses faced. From kitchen boilers and laundry heaps, from wash baskets and drying ropes, he skimmed the pick of what was offered--silk shirts, fancy hose, women's embroidered blouses, women's belaced under-things. His work was made comparatively easy for him, since the dwellers of the houses would be watching the parade.

His strippings he carried to the show lot and there he hid them away. That night in the privilege car the collections of the day would be disposed of by sale or trade to members of the troupe and the affiliated rogues. Especially desirable pieces might be reserved to be shipped on to a professional receiver of stolen goods in a certain city. Naturally, pickings were at their best on a Monday, for since Mother Eve on the first Monday hanged her fig leaf out to dry, Monday has been wash day the world over. Hence the name for the practitioner of the business.

Vince Marr did not very long remain a Monday guy. The risks were not very great, everything considered. Suppose detection did come; suppose the cry of "Stop thief!" was raised. Who would quit watching a circus parade to join in a hunt for a marauder already vanished in a maze of outbuildings and alleyways? Still there were risks to be taken, and the rewards on the whole were small and uncertain. Before he reached his nineteenth year young Marr was the manager of a weighing pitch. Apparently he had but one associate in the enterprise; as a matter of fact he had four. In the place where holidaying crowds gathered--on a circus lot, at a street carnival, outside the gates of a county fair--he and his visible partner would set up his weighing device, and then stationing himself near it he would beseech you to let him guess your correct weight. If he guessed within three pounds of it, as recorded by the machine, you owed him a nickel; if he failed to guess within three pounds of it you owed him nothing. "Take a chance, brother!" he would entreat you with friendly jovial banter. "Be a sport--take a chance!" Let us say you accepted his proposition. Swiftly he would flip with his hands along your sides, would slap your flanks, would pinch you gently as though testing your flesh for solidity, then would call out loudly so that all within earshot might hear: "I figure that the gentleman weighs--let me see--exactly one hundred and forty-seven pounds." Or perhaps he would predict: "This big fellow will pull her down at two hundred and eight pounds, no more and no less." Then you placed yourself in the swinging seat of the machine with your feet clear of the earth, and his partner duly weighed you. Sometimes Marr guessed your weight; quite as often, though, he failed to come within three pounds of it and you paid him nothing for his pains. It was difficult to figure how so precarious a means of income could be made to yield a proper return unless the scales were dishonest.

The scales were honest enough. The real profits were derived from quite a different source. Three master dips--pickpockets--were waiting for you as you moved off; they attended to your case with neatness and dispatch. Their work was expedited for them by reason that already they knew where you carried your valuables. Once Marr ran his swift and practiced fingers over your body he knew where your watch was, your wallet, your purse for small change, your roll of bills.

A code word in his patter advertised to his confederates exactly whereabouts upon your person the treasure was carried. Really the business gave splendid returns. It was Marr, though, who had seized upon it when it merely was a catchpenny carnival device and made of it a real money earner. Moreover, the pickpockets took the real peril. Even in the infrequent event of the detection of them there was no evidence to justify the suspicion that the proprietors of the weighing machine were accessories to the pocket looting. Vince Marr was like that--always playing safe for himself, always thinking a jump ahead of his crowd and a jump and a half ahead of the police.

He was never the one to get into a rut and stay there. Long before the old-time grafting circuses grew scarce and scarcer, and before the street-fairing concessions progressed out of their primitive beginnings into orderly and recognized organizations, he had quitted both fields for higher and more lucrative ramifications of his craft. Ask any old-time con man who ostensibly has reformed. If he tells you the truth--which is doubtful--he will tell you it was Chappy Marr who really evolved the fake foot-racing game, who patched up the leaks in the wireless wire-tapping game, who standardized at least two popular forms of the send game, who improved marvelously upon three differing versions of the pay-off game.

All the time he was perfecting himself in his profession, fitting himself for the practice of it in its highermost departments. He learned to tone down his wardrobe. He polished his manners until they had a gloss on them. He labored assiduously to correct his grammar, and so well succeeded at the task that except when he was among associates and relapsed into the argot of the breed, he used language fit for a college professor--fit for some college professors anyway. At thirty he was a glib, spry person with a fancy for gay housings. At forty-five, when he reached the top of his swing, he had the looks, the vocabulary and the presence of an educated and a traveled person.

He had one technical defect, if defect it might be called. In the larger affairs of his unhallowed business he displayed a mental adaptability, a talent to think quickly and shift his tactics to meet the suddenly arisen emergency, which was the envy of lesser underworld notables; but in smaller details of life he was prone to follow the line of least resistance, which is true of the most of us, honest and dishonest men the same. For instance, though he had half a dozen or more common aliases--names which he changed as he changed his collars--he pursued a certain fixed rule in choosing them, just as a man in picking out neckties might favor mixed weaves and varied patterns but stick always to the same general color scheme. He might be Vincent C. Marr, which was his proper name, or among intimates Chappy Marr. Then again he might be Col. Van Camp Morgan, of Louisiana; or Mr. Vance C. Michaels, a Western mine owner; or Victor C. Morehead; he might be a Markham or a Murrill or a Marsh or a Murphy as the occasion and the role and his humor suited. Always, though, the initials were the same. Partly this was for convenience--the name was so much easier to remember then--but partly it was due to that instinct for ordered routine which in a reputable sphere of endeavor would have made this man rather conventional and methodical in his personal habits, however audacious and resourceful he might have been on his public side and his professional. He especially was lucky in that he never acquired any of those mouth-filling nicknames such as Paper Collar Joe wore, and Grand Central Pete and Appetite Willie and the Mitt-and-a-Half Kid and the late Soapy Smith--picturesque enough, all of them, but giving to the wearers thereof an undesirable prominence in newspapers and to that added extent curtailing their usefulness in their own special areas of operation.

Nor had he ever smelled the chloride-of-lime-and-circus-cage smell of the inside of a state's prison; no Bertillon sharp had on file his measurements and thumb prints, nor did any central office or detective bureau contain his rogues-gallery photograph. Times almost past counting he had been taken up on suspicion; more than once had been arrested on direct charges, and at least twice had been indicted. But because of connections with crooked lawyers and approachable politicians and venal police officials and because also of his own individual canniness, he always had escaped conviction and imprisonment. There was no stink of the stone hoosgow on his correctly tailored garments, and no barber other than one of his own choosing had ever shingled Chappy Marr's hair. Within reason, therefore, he was free to come and go, to bide and to tarry; and come and go at will he did until that unfortuitous hour when the affair of the wealthy Mrs. Propbridge and her husband came to pass.

When the period of post-wartime inflation came upon this country specialized thievery marched abreast with legitimate enterprise; with it as with the other, rewards became tremendously larger; small turnovers were regarded as puny and contemptible, and operators thought in terms of pyramiding thousands of dollars where before they had been glad to strive for speculative returns of hundreds. By now Chappy Marr had won his way to the forefront of his kind. The same intelligence invoked, the same energies exercised, and in almost any proper field he would before this have been a rich man and an honored one. By his twisted code of ethics and unmorals, though, the dubious preeminence he enjoyed was ample reward. He stood forth from the ruck and run, a creator and a leader who could afford to pass by the lesser, more precarious games, with their prospect of uncertain takings, for the really big and important things. He was like a specialist who having won a prominent position may now say that he will accept only such patients as he pleases and treat only such cases as appeal to him.

This being so, there were open to him two especially favored lines: he might be a deep-sea fisherman, meaning by that a crooked card player traveling on ocean steamers; or he might be the head of a swell mob of blackmailers preying upon more or less polite society. For the first he had not the digital facility which was necessary; his fingers lacked the requisite deftness, however agile and flexible the brain which directed the fingers might be. So Chappy Marr turned his talents to blackmailing. Blackmailing plants had acquired a sudden vogue; nearly all the wise-cracking kings and queens of Marr's world had gone or were going into them. Moreover, blackmailing offered an opportunity for variety of scope and ingenuity in the mechanics of its workings which appealed mightily to a born originator. Finally there was a paramount consideration. Of all the tricks and devices at the command of the top-hole rogue it was the very safest to play. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred the victim had his social position or his business reputation to think of, else in the first place he would never have been picked on as a fit subject for victimizing. Therefore he was all the more disposed to pay and keep still, and pay again.

The bait in the trap of the average blackmailing plant is a woman--a young woman, good-looking, well groomed and smart. It is with her that the quarry is compromisingly entangled. But against women confederates Chappy Marr had a strong prejudice. They were such uncertain quantities; you never could depend upon them. They were emotional, temperamental; they let their sentimental attachments run away with their judgment; they fell in love, which was bad; they talked too much, which was worse; they were fickle-minded and jealous; they were given to falling out with male pals, and they had been known to carry a jealous grudge to the point of turning informer. So he set his inventions to the task of evolving a blackmailing snare which might be set and sprung, and afterwards dismantled and hidden away without the intervention of the female knave of the species in any of its stages. Trust him--smooth as lubricating oil, a veritable human graphite--to turn the trick. He turned it.

The upshot was a lovely thing, almost foolproof and practically cop-proof. To be sure, a woman figured in it, but her part was that of the chosen prey, not the part of an accessory and accomplice. The greater simplicity of the device was attested by the fact that for its mounting, from beginning to end, only three active performers were needed. The chief role he would play. For his main supporting cast he needed two men, and knew moreover exactly where to find them. Of these two only one would show ever upon the stage. The other would bide out of sight behind the scenes, doing his share of the work, unsuspected, from under cover.

For the part which he intended her to take in his production--the part of dupe--Mrs. Justus Propbridge was, as one might say, made to order. Consider her qualifications: young, pretty, impressionable, vain and inexperienced; the second wife of a man who even in these times of suddenly inflated fortunes was reckoned to be rich; newly come out of the boundless West, bringing a bounding social ambition with her; spending money freely and having plenty more at command to spend when the present supply was gone; her name appearing frequently in those newspapers and those weekly and monthly magazines catering particularly to the so-called smart set, which is so called, one gathers, because it is not a set and is not particularly smart.

Young Mrs. Propbridge figured that her name was becoming tolerably well known along the Gold Coast of the North Atlantic Seaboard. It was too. For example, there was at least one person entirely unknown to her who kept a close tally of her comings and her goings, of her social activities, of her mode of daily life. This person was Vincent Marr. Thanks to the freedom with which a certain type of journal discusses the private and the public affairs of those men and women most commonly mentioned in its columns, he presently had in his mind a very clear picture of this lady, and he followed her movements, as reflected in print, with care and fidelity; it was as though he had a deep personal interest in her. For a matter of fact, he did; he had a very personal interest in her. He had been doing this for months; in his trade, as in many others, patience was not only a virtue but a necessity. For example, he knew that her determined and persistent but somewhat crudely engineered campaigning to establish herself in what New York calls--with a big S--Society was the subject in some quarters of a somewhat thinly veiled derision; he knew that her husband was rather an elemental, not to say a primitive creature, but genuine and aboveboard and generous, as elemental beings are likely to be. Marr figured him to be of the jealous type. He hoped he was; it might simplify matters tremendously.

On a certain summer morning a paragraph appeared in at least three daily papers to the effect that Mr. and Mrs. Justus Propbridge had gone down to Gulf Stream City, on the Maryland coast; they would be at the Churchill-Fontenay there for a week or ten days. It was at his breakfast that Marr read this information. At noon, having in the meantime done a considerable amount of telephoning, he was on his way to the seaside too. Mentally he was shaking hands with himself in a warmly congratulatory way. Gulf Stream City was a place seemingly designed, both by Nature and by man, for the serving of his purposes.

Residing there were persons of his own kidney and persuasion, on whom he might count for at least one detail of invaluable cooperation. For a certain act of his piece, a short but highly important one, he also must have a borrowed stage setting and a supernumerary actor or so.

Immediately upon his arrival he sought out certain dependable individuals and put them through a rough rehearsal. This he did before he claimed the room he had engaged by wire at the Hotel Crofter. The Hotel Crofter snuggled its lesser bulk under an imposing flank of the supposedly exclusive and admittedly expensive Churchill-Fontenay. From its verandas one might command a view of the main entrance of the greater hotel.

It was on a Tuesday that the Propbridges reached Gulf Stream City. It was on Wednesday afternoon that the husband received a telegram, signed with the name of a business associate, calling him to Toledo for a conference--so the wire stated--upon an urgent complication newly arisen. Mr. Propbridge, as all the world knew, was one of the heaviest stockholders and a member of the board of the Sonnesbein-Propbridge Tire Company, which, as the world likewise knew, had had tremendous dealings in contracts with the Government and now was having trouble closing up the loose ends of its wartime activities.

He packed a bag and caught a night train West. On the following morning, which would be Thursday, Mrs. Propbridge took a stroll on Gulf Stream City's famous boardwalk. It was rather a lonely stroll. She had no particular objective. It was too early in the day for a full display of vivid costumes among the bathers on the beach. She encountered no one she knew.

Really, for a resort so extensively advertised, Gulf Stream City was not a particularly exciting place. For lack of anything better to do she had halted to view the contents of a shop window when an exclamation of happy surprise from someone immediately behind her caused Mrs. Propbridge to turn around.

Immediately it was her turn to register astonishment. A tall, well-dressed, gray-haired man, a stranger to her, was taking possession of her right hand and shaking it warmly.

"Why, my dear Mrs. Watrous," he was saying, "how do you do? Well, this is an unexpected pleasure! When did you come down from Wilmington? And who is with you? And how long are you going to stay? General Dunlap and his daughter Claire--you know, the second daughter--and Mrs. Gordon-Tracy and Freddy Urb will be here in a little while. They'll be delighted to see you! Why, we'll have a reunion! Well, well, well!"

He had said all this with scarcely a pause for breath and without giving her an opportunity to speak, as though surprise made him disregardful of labial punctuation of his sentences. Indeed, Mrs. Propbridge did not succeed in getting her hand free from his grasp until he had uttered the final "well."

"You have the advantage of me," she said. "I do not know you. I am sure I never saw you before."

At this his sudden shift from cordiality to a look half incredulous, half embarrassed was almost comic.

"What?" he demanded, falling back a pace. "Surely this is Mrs. Beeman Watrous of Wilmington? I can't be mistaken!"

"But you are mistaken," she insisted; "very much mistaken. My name is not Watrous; my name is Propbridge."

"Madam," he cried, "I beg ten thousand pardons! Really, though, this is one of the most remarkable things I ever saw in my life--one of the most remarkable cases of resemblance, I mean. I am sure anyone would be deceived by it; that is my apology. In my own behalf, madam, I must tell you that you are an exact counterpart of someone I know--of Mrs. Beeman Watrous, a very good friend of mine. Pardon me once more, but may I ask if you are related to Mrs. Beeman Watrous? Her cousin perhaps? It isn't humanly possible that two persons should look so much alike and not be related?"

"I don't think I ever heard of the lady," stated Mrs. Propbridge somewhat coldly.

"Again, madam, please excuse me," he said. "I am very, very sorry to have annoyed you." He bowed his bared head and turned away. Then quickly he swung on his heel and returned to her, his hat again in his left hand.

"Madam," he said, "I am fearful that you are suspecting me of being one of the objectionable breed of he-flirts who infest this place. At the risk of being tiresome I must repeat once more that your wonderful resemblance to another person led me into this awkward error. My name, madam, is Murrill--Valentine C. Murrill--and I am sure that if you only had the time and the patience to bear with me I could find someone here--some acquaintance of yours perhaps--who would vouch for me and make it plain to you that I am not addicted to the habit of forcing myself upon strangers on the pretext that I have met them somewhere."

His manner was disarming. It was more than that; it was outright engaging. He was carefully groomed, smartly turned out; he had the manner and voice of a well-bred person. To Mrs. Propbridge he seemed a candid, courteous soul unduly distressed over a small matter.

"Please don't concern yourself about it," she said. "I didn't suspect you of being a professional masher; I was only rather startled, that's all."

"Thank you for telling me so," he said. "You take a load off my mind, I assure you. Pardon me again, please--but did I understand you to say a moment ago that your name was Propbridge?"

"Yes."

"It isn't a very common name. Surely you are not the Mrs. Propbridge?"

Without being in the least presuming he somehow had managed to convey a subtle tribute.

"I am Mrs. Justus Propbridge, if that is what you mean," she said.

"Well, then," he said in tones of relief, "that simplifies matters. Is your husband about, madam? If he is I will do myself the honor of introducing myself to him and repeating to him the explanation I have just made to you. You see, I am by way of being one of the small fish who circulate on the outer edge of the big sea where the large financial whales swim, and it is possible that he may have heard my name and may know who I am."

"My husband isn't here," she explained. "He was called away last night on business."

"Again my misfortune," he said.

They were in motion now; he had fallen into step alongside her as she moved on back up the boardwalk. Plainly her amazing resemblance to someone else was once more the uppermost subject in his mind. He went back to it.

"I've heard before now of dual personalities," he said, "but this is my first actual experience with a case of it. When I first saw you standing there with your back to me and even when you turned round facing me after I spoke to you, I was ready to swear that you were Mrs. Beeman Watrous. Look, manner, size, voice, hair, eyes--all identical. I know her very well too. I've been a guest at one or two of her house parties. It's curious that you never heard of her, Mrs. Propbridge; she's the widow of one of the Wilmington Watrouses--the firearms people, you know--guns, rifles, all that sort of thing--and he left her more millions than she knows what to do with."

Now Mrs. Propbridge had never heard of any Wilmington Watrouses, but plainly, here in the East they were persons of consequence--persons who would be worth knowing.

She nodded as though to indicate that now she did faintly recall who it was this kindly stranger had meant.

He went on. It was evident that he was inclined to be talkative. The impression was conveyed to her that here was a well-meaning but rather shallow-minded gentleman who was reasonably fond of the sound of his own voice. Yet about him was nothing to suggest over-effusiveness or familiarity.

"I've a sort of favor to ask of you," he said. "I've some friends who're motoring over to-day from Philadelphia. I had to run on down ahead of them to see a man on business. They're to join me in about an hour from now"--he consulted his watch--"and we're all driving back together to-night. General Dunlap and Mrs. Claire Denton, his daughter--she's the amateur tennis champion, you know--and Mrs. Gordon-Tracy, of Newport, and Freddy Urb, the writer--they're all in the party. And the favor I'm asking is that I may have the pleasure of presenting them to you--that is, of course, unless you already know them--so that I may enjoy the looks on their faces when they find out that you are not Mrs. Beeman Watrous. I know they'll behave as I did. They won't believe it at first. May I?"

What could Mrs. Propbridge do except consent? Indeed, inwardly she rejoiced at the prospect. She did not know personally the four named by this Mr. Murrill, but she knew mighty well who they were. What person familiar with the Social Register could fail to know who they were? Another thing had impressed her: The stranger had mentioned these notables with no especial emphasis on the names; but instead, quite casually and in a manner which carried with it the impression that such noted folk as Mrs. Denton and her distinguished father, and Freddy Urb the court jester of the innermost holies of holies of Newport and Bar Harbor and Palm Beach, and Mrs. Gordon-Tracy, the famous beauty, were of the sort with whom customarily he associated. Plainly here was a gentleman who not only belonged to the who's-who but had a very clear perception of the what-was-what. So fluttered little Mrs. Propbridge promptly said yes--said it with a gratified sensation in her heart.

"That's fine of you!" said Murrill, visibly elated. It would appear that small favors were to him great pleasures. "That's splendid! Up until now the joke of this thing has been on me. I want to transfer it to them. I'm to meet them up here in the lounge of the Churchill-Fontenay."

"That's where I am stopping," said Mrs. Propbridge.

"Is it? Better and better! We might stroll along that way if you don't mind. By Jove, I've an idea! Suppose when they arrive they found us chatting together like old friends--suppose as they came up they were to overhear me calling you Mrs. Beeman Watrous. That would make the shock all the greater for them when they found out you really weren't Mrs. Watrous at all, but somebody they'd never seen before! Are you game for it?... Capital! Only, if we mean to do that we'll have to kill the time, some way, for forty or fifty minutes or so. Do you mind letting me bore you for a little while? I know it's unconventional--but I like to do the unconventional things when they don't make one conspicuous."

Mrs. Propbridge did not in the least mind. So they killed the time and it died a very agreeable death, barring one small incident. On Mr. Murrill's invitation they took a short turn in a double-seated roller chair, Mr. Murrill chatting briskly all the while and savoring his conversation with offhand reference to this well-known personage and that. At his suggestion they quit the wheel chair at a point well down the boardwalk to drink orangeades in a small glass-fronted cafe which faced the sea. He had heard somewhere, he said, that they made famous orangeades in this shop. They might try for themselves and find out.

The experiment was not entirely a success. To begin with, a waiter person--Mr. Murrill referred to him as a waiter person--sat them down near the front at a small, round table whose enamel top was decorated with two slopped glasses and a bottle one-third filled with wine gone stale. At least the stuff looked and smelled like wine--like a poor quality of champagne.

"Ugh!" said Mr. Murrill, tasting the air. "Somebody evidently couldn't wait until lunch time before he started his tippling. And I didn't suspect either that this place might be a bootlegging place in disguise. Well, since prohibition came in it's hard to find a resort shop anywhere where you can't buy bad liquor--if only you go about it the right way."

When the waiter person brought their order he bade him remove the bottle and the slopped glasses, and the waiter person obliged, but so sulkily and with such slowness of movement that Mr. Murrill was moved to speak to him rather sharply. Even so, the sullen functionary took his time about the thing. Nor did the orangeade prove particularly appetizing. Mr. Murrill barely tasted his.

"Shall we clear out?" he asked, making a fastidious little grimace.

At the door, on the way out, he made excuses.

"Sorry I suggested coming into this place," he said, sinking his voice. "Either it is a shop which has gone off badly or its merits have been overadvertised by its loving friends. To me the whole atmosphere of the establishment seemed rather dubious, eh, what? Well, what shall we do next? I see a few bathers down below. Shall we go down on the beach and find a place to sit and watch them for a bit?"

They went; and he found a bench in a quiet place under the shorings of the boardwalk close up alongside one of the lesser bathing pavilions, and they sat there, and he talked and she listened. The man had an endless fund of gossip about amusing and noted people; most of them, it would seem, were his intimates. Telling one or two incidents in which these distinguished friends had figured, he felt it expedient to sink his voice to a discreet undertone. There was plainly apparent a delicacy of feeling in this; one did not shout out the names of such persons for any curious passer-by to hear. It developed that there was one specially close bond between him and the members of General Dunlap's family, an attachment partly based upon old acquaintance and partly upon the fact that the Dunlaps thought he once upon a time had saved the life of the general's youngest daughter, Millicent.

"Really, though, it was nothing," he said deprecatingly, as befitted a modest and a mannerly man. "The thing came about like this: It was once when we were all out West together. We were spending a week at the Grand Canyon. One morning we took the Rim Drive over to Mohave Point. No doubt you know the spot? I was standing with Millicent on the outer edge of the cliff and we were looking down together into that tremendous void when all of a sudden she fainted dead away. Her heart isn't very strong--she isn't athletic as Claire, her older sister, and the other Dunlap girls are--and I suppose the altitude got her. Luckily I was as close to her as I am to you now, and I saw her totter and I threw out my arms--pardon me--like this." He illustrated with movements of his arms. "And luckily I managed to catch her about the waist as she fell forward. I held on and dragged her back out of danger. Otherwise she would have dropped for no telling how many hundreds of feet. Of course it was only a chance that I happened to be touching elbows with the child, and naturally I only did what anyone would have done in the same circumstances, but the whole family were tremendously grateful and made a great pother over it. By the way, speaking of rescues, have you heard about the thing that happened to the two Van Norden girls at Bailey's Beach last week? I must tell you about that."

Presently they both were surprised to find that forty-five minutes had passed. Mr. Murrill said they had better be getting along; he made so bold as to venture the suggestion that possibly Mrs. Propbridge might want to go to her rooms before the automobile party arrived, to change her frock or something. Not that he personally thought she should change it. If he might be pardoned for saying so, he thought it a most becoming frock; but women were curious about such things, now honestly weren't they? And Mrs. Propbridge was constrained to confess that about such things women were curious. She had a conviction that if all things moved smoothly she presently would be urged to waive formality and join the party at luncheon. Mr. Murrill had not exactly put the idea into words yet, but she sensed that the thought of offering the invitation was in his mind. In any event the impending meeting called for efforts on her part to appear at her best.

"I believe I will run up to our rooms for a few minutes before your friends arrive," she said as they arose from the bench. "I want to freshen up a bit."

"Quite so," he assented.

He left her at the doors of the Churchill-Fontenay, saying he would idle about and watch for the others in case they should arrive ahead of time.

Ten minutes later, while she was still trying to make a choice between three frocks, her telephone rang. She answered the ring; it was Mr. Murrill, who was at the other end of the line. He was distressed to have to tell her that word had just reached him that on the way down from Philadelphia General Dunlap had been taken suddenly ill--an attack of acute indigestion, perhaps, or possibly a touch of the sun--and the motor trip had been halted at a small town on the mainland fifteen miles back of Gulf Stream City. He was starting immediately for the town in a car with a physician. He trusted the general's indisposition was not really serious but of course the party would be called off; and the invalid would return to Philadelphia as soon as he felt well enough to move. He was awfully sorry--Mr. Murrill was--terribly put out, and all that sort of thing; hoped that another opportunity might be vouchsafed him of meeting Mrs. Propbridge; he had enjoyed tremendously meeting her under these unconventional circumstances; and now he must go.

It was not to be denied that young Mrs. Propbridge felt distinctly disappointed. The start of the little adventure had had promise in it. She had forecast all manner of agreeable contingencies as the probable outcome.

For some reason, though, or perhaps for no definite reason at all, she said nothing to her husband, on his return from Toledo, of her encounter with the agreeable Mr. Murrill. Anyway, he arrived in no very affable state of mind. As a matter of fact he was most terrifically out of temper. Somebody or other--presumably some ass of a practical joker, he figured, or possibly a person with a grudge against him who had curious methods of taking vengeance--had lured him into taking a hot, dusty, tiresome and entirely useless trip. There was no business conference on out at Toledo; no need for his presence there. If he could lay hands on the idiot who had sent him that forged telegram--well, the angered Mr. Propbridge indicated with a gesture of a large and knobby fist what he would do to the aforesaid idiot.

The next time Mr. Propbridge was haled to the broiling Corn Belt he made very sure that the warrant was genuine. One of these wild-goose chases a summer was quite enough for a man with a size-nineteen collar and a forty-six-inch waistband.

The next time befell some ten days after the Propbridges returned from the shore to their thirty-thousand-dollars-a-year apartment on Upper Park Avenue. The very fact that they did live in an apartment and that they did spend a good part of their time there would stamp them for what they were--persons not yet to be included among the really fashionable group. The really fashionable maintained large homes which they occupied when they came to town to have dental work done or to launch a debutante daughter into society; the rest of the year they usually were elsewhere. It was the thing.

Business of importance sent Mr. Propbridge to Detroit, and then on to Chicago and Des Moines. On a certain afternoon he caught the Wolverine Limited. Almost before his train had passed One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street Mrs. Propbridge had a caller. She was informed that a member of the staff of that live paper, People You Know, desired to see her for a few minutes. Persons of social consequence or persons who craved to be of social consequence did not often deny themselves to representatives of People You Know. Mrs. Propbridge told the switchboard girl downstairs to tell the hallman to invite the gentleman to come up.

He proved to be a somewhat older man than she had expected to see. He was well dressed enough, but about him was something hard and forbidding, almost formidable in fact. Yet there was a soothing, conciliatory tone in his voice when he spoke.

"Mrs. Propbridge," he began, "my name is Townsend. I am one of the editors of People You Know. I might have sent one of our reporters to see you, but in a matter so important--and so delicate as this one is--I felt it would be better if I came personally to have a little talk with you and get your side of the affair for publication."

"My side of what affair?" she asked, puzzled.

He lifted one lip in a cornerwise smile.

"Let me give you a little advice, Mrs. Propbridge," he said. "I've had a lot of experience in such matters as these. The interested parties will be better off if they're perfectly frank in talking to the press. Then all misunderstandings are avoided and everybody gets a fair deal in print. Don't you agree with me that I am right?"

"You may be right," she said, "but I haven't the least idea what you are talking about."

"I mean your trouble with your husband--if you force me to speak plainly; I'd like to have your statement, that's all."

"But I haven't had any trouble with my husband!" she said. Her amazement made her voice shrill. "My husband and I are living together in perfect happiness. You've made a mistake."

"No chance," he said, and suddenly his manner changed from the sympathetic to the accusing. "Mrs. Propbridge, we have exclusive advance information from reliable sources--a straight tip--that the proof against you is about to be turned over to your husband and we've every reason to believe that when he gets it in his hands he's going to sue you for divorce, naming as corespondent a certain middle-aged man. Do you mean to tell me you don't know anything about that?"

"Of course I mean to! Why, you're crazy! You're--"

"Wait just one minute please," he interrupted the distressed lady. "Wait until I get through telling you how much I know already; then you'll see that denials won't help you any. As a matter of fact we're ready now to go ahead and spring the story in next week's issue, but I thought it was only fair to come to you and give you a chance to make your defense in print--if you care to make one."

"I still tell you that you've made a terrible mistake," she declared. Her anger began to stir within her, as indignation succeeded to astonishment. "How dare you come here accusing me of doing anything wrong!"

"I'm accusing you of nothing. I'm only going by the plain evidence. I might be lying to you. Other people might lie to you. But, madam, photographs don't lie. That's why they're the best possible evidence in a divorce court. And I've seen the evidence. I've got it in my pocket right now."

"Evidence against me? Photographs of me?"

"Sure. Photographs of you and the gray-haired party." He reached in a breast pocket and brought out a thin sheaf of unmounted photographs and handed them to her. "Mrs. Propbridge, just take a look at these and then tell me if you blame me for assuming that there's bound to be trouble when your husband sees them?"

She looked, and her twirling brain told her it was all a nightmare, but her eyes told her it was not. Here were five photographs, enlarged snapshots apparently: One, a profile view, showing her standing on a boardwalk, her hand held in the hand of the man she had known as Valentine C. Murrill; one, a quartering view, revealing them riding together in a wheel chair, their heads close together, she smiling and he apparently whispering something of a pleasing and confidential nature to her, the posture of both almost intimate; one, a side view, showing the pair of them emerging from an open-fronted cafe--she recognized the facade of the place where they had found the orangeades so disappointing--and in this picture Mr. Murrill had been caught by the camera as he was saying something of seeming mutual interest, for she was glancing up sidewise at him and he had lowered his head until his lips almost touched her ear; one, showing them sitting at a small round table with a wine bottle and glasses in front of them and behind them a background suggesting the interior of a rather shabby drinking place, a distinct impression of sordidness somehow conveyed; and one, a rear view, showing them upon a bench alongside a seemingly deserted wooden structure of some sort, and in this one the man had been snapped in the very act of putting his arms about her and drawing her toward him.

That was all--merely five oblong slips of chemically printed paper, and yet on the face of them they told a damning and a condemning story.

She stared at them, she who was absolutely innocent of thought or intent of wrong-doing, and could feel the fabric of her domestic life trembling before it came crashing down.

"Oh, but this is too horrible for words!" the distressed lady cried out. "How could anybody have been so cruel, so malicious, as to follow us and waylay us and catch us in these positions? It's monstrous!"

"Somebody did catch you, then, in compromising attitudes--you admit that?"

"You twist my words to give them a false meaning!" she exclaimed. "You are trying to trap me into saying something that would put me in a wrong light. I can explain--why, the whole thing is so simple when you understand."

"Suppose you do explain, then. Get me right, Mrs. Propbridge--I'm all for you in this affair. I want to give you the best of it from every standpoint."

So she explained, her words pouring forth in a torrent. She told him in such details as she recalled the entire history of her meeting with the vanished Mr. Murrill--how a doctored telegram sent her husband away and left her alone, how Murrill had accosted her, and why and what followed--all of it she told him, withholding nothing.

He waited until she was through. Then he sped a bolt, watching her closely, for upon the way she took it much, from his viewpoint, depended.

"Well," he said, "if that's the way this thing happened and if you've told your husband about it"--he dragged his words just a trifle--"why should you be so worried, even if these pictures should reach him?"

Her look told him the shot had struck home. Inwardly he rejoiced, knowing, before she answered, what her answer would be.

"But I didn't tell him," she confessed, stricken with a new cause for concern. "I--I forgot to tell him."

"Oh, you forgot to tell him?" he repeated. Now suddenly he became a cross-examiner, snapping his questions at her, catching her up sharply in her replies. "And you say you never saw this Mr. Murrill--as you call him--before in all your life?"

"No."

"And you've never seen the mysterious stranger since?"

"There was nothing mysterious about him, I tell you. He was merely interesting."

"Anyhow, you've never seen him since?"

"No."

"Nor had any word from him other than that telephone talk you say you had with him?"

"No."

"Did you ever make any inquiries with a view to finding out whether there was such a person as this Mrs. Beeman Watrous?"

"No; why should I?"

"That's a question for you to decide. Did you think to look in the papers to see whether General Dunlap had really been taken ill on a motor trip?"

"No."

"Yet he's a well-known person. Surely you expected the papers would mention his illness?"

"It never occurred to me to look. I tell you there was nothing wrong about it. Why do you try to trip me up so?"

"Excuse me, I'm only trying to help you out of what looks like a pretty bad mess. But I've got to get the straight of it. Let me run over the points in your story: No sooner do you land in Gulf Stream City than your husband gets a faked-up telegram and goes away? And you are left all alone? And you go for a walk all by yourself? And a man you never laid eyes on before comes up to you and tells you that you look a lot like a friend of his, a certain very rich widow, Mrs. Watrous--somebody, though, that I for one never heard of, and I know the Social Register from cover to cover, and know something about Wilmington too. And on the strength of your imaginary resemblance to an imaginary somebody he introduced himself to you? And then you let him walk with you? And you let him whisper pleasant things in your ear? Two of those pictures that you've got in your hand prove that. And you let him take you into one of the most notorious blind tigers on the beach? And you sit there with him in this dump--this place with a shady reputation--"

"I've explained to you how that happened. We didn't stay there. We came right out."

"Let me go on, please. And you let him buy you wine there?"

"I've told you about that part, too--how the bottles and the glasses were already on the table when we sat down."

"I'm merely going by what the photographs tell, Mrs. Propbridge. I'm merely saying to you what a smart divorce lawyer would say to you if ever he got you on the witness stand; only he'd be trying to convict you by your own words and I'm trying to give you every chance to clear yourself. And then after that you go and sit with him--this perfect stranger--in a lonely place alongside a deserted bath house and nobody else in sight?"

"There were people bathing right in front of us all the time."

"Were there? Well, take a look at Photograph Number Five and see if it shows any bathers in sight. And he slips his arm around you and draws you to him?"

"I explained to you how that happened," protested the badgered, desperate woman. "No matter what the circumstances seem to be, I did nothing wrong, I tell you."

"All right, just as you say. Remember, I'm taking your side of it; I'm trying to be your friend. But here's the important thing for you to consider: With those pictures laid before them would any jury on earth believe your side of it? Would they believe you had no hand in sending your husband that faked-up telegram? Would they believe it wasn't a trick to get him away so you could keep an appointment with this man? Would any judge believe you? Would your friends believe you? Or would they all say that they never heard such a transparent cock-and-bull story in their lives?"

"Oh, oh!" she cried chokingly, and put her face in her hands. Then she threw up her head and stared at him out of her miserable eyes. "Where did those pictures come from? You say you believe in me, that you are willing to help me. Then tell me where they came from and who took them? And how did you manage to get hold of them?"

His baitings had carried her exactly to the desired place--the turning point, they call it in the vernacular of the confidence sharp. The rest should be easy.

"Mrs. Propbridge," he said, "you've been pretty frank with me. I'll be equally frank with you. Those pictures were brought to our office by the man who took them. I have his name and address, but am not at liberty to tell them to anyone. I don't know what his motives were in taking them; we did not ask him that either. We can't afford to question the motives of people who bring us these exclusive tips. We pay a fancy price for them and that lets us out. Besides, these photographs seemed to speak for themselves. So we paid him the price he asked for the use of them. Destroying these copies wouldn't help you any. That man still has the plates; he could print them over again. The only hope you've got is to get hold of those plates. And I'm afraid he'll ask a big price for them."

"How big a price?"

"That I couldn't say without seeing him. Knowing the sort of person he is, my guess is that he'd expect you to hand him over a good-sized chunk of money to begin with--as a proof of your intentions to do business with him. You'd have to pay him in cash; he'd be too wise to take a check. And then he might want so much apiece for each plate or he might insist on your paying him a lump sum for the whole lot. You see, what he evidently expects to do is to sell them to your husband, and he'd expect you at least to meet the price your husband would have to pay. Any way you look at it he's got you at his mercy--and, as I see it, you'll probably have to come to his terms if you want to keep this thing a secret."

"Where is this man? You keep saying you want to serve me--can't you bring him to me?"

"I'm afraid he wouldn't come. If he's engaged in a shady business--if he's cooked up a deliberate scheme to trap you--he won't come near you. That's my guess. But if you are willing to trust me to act as your representative maybe the whole thing might be arranged and no one except us ever be the wiser for it."

Mrs. Propbridge being an average woman did what the average woman, thus cruelly circumstanced and sorely frightened and half frantic and lacking advice from honest folk, would do. She paid and she paid and she kept on paying. First off, it appeared the paper had to be recompensed for its initial outlay and for various vaguely explained incidental expenses which it had incurred in connection with the affair. Then, through Townsend, the unknown principal demanded that a larger sum should be handed over as an evidence of good faith on her part before he would consider further negotiations. This, though, turned out to be only the beginning of the extortion processes.

When, on this pretext and that, she had been mulcted of nearly fourteen thousand dollars, when her personal bank account had been exhausted, when most of her jewelry was secretly in pawn, when still she had not yet been given the telltale plates, but daily was being tortured by threats of exposure unless she surrendered yet more money, poor badgered beleaguered little Mrs. Propbridge, being an honest and a straightforward woman, took the course she should have taken at the outset. She went to her husband and she told him the truth. And he believed her.

He did not stop with believing her; he bestirred himself. He had money; he had the strength and the authority which money gives. He had something else--he had that powerful, intangible thing which among police officials and in the inner politics of city governments is variously known as a pull and a drag. Straightway he invoked it.

Of a sudden Chappy Marr was aware that he had made a grievous mistake. He had calculated to garner for himself a fat roll of the Propbridge currency; had counted upon enjoying a continuing source of income for so long as the wife continued to hand over hush money. Deduct the cuts which went to Zach Traynor, alias Townsend, for playing the part of the magazine editor, and to Cheesy Mike Zaugbaum, that camera wizard of newspaper staff work turned crook's helper--Zaugbaum it was who had worked the trick of the photographs--and still the major share of the spoils due him ought, first and last, to run into five gratifying figures. On this he confidently had figured. He had not reckoned into the equation the possibility of invoking against him the Propbridge pull backed by the full force of this double-fisted, vengeful millionaire's rage. Indeed he never supposed that there might be any such pull. And here, practically without warning, he found his influence arrayed against an infinitely stronger influence, so that his counted for considerably less than nothing at all.

Still, there was a warning. He got away to Toronto. Traynor made Chicago and went into temporary seclusion there. Cheesy Zaugbaum lacked the luck of these two. As soon as Mrs. Propbridge had described the ingratiating Mr. Murrill and the obliging Mr. Townsend to M. J. Brock, head of the Brock private-detective agency, that astute but commonplace-appearing gentleman knew whom she meant. Knowing so much, it was not hard for him to add one to one and get three. He deduced who the third member of the triumvirate must be. Mr. Brock owed his preeminence in his trade to one outstanding faculty--he was an honest man who could think like a thief. Three hours after he concluded his first interview with the lady one of his operatives walked up behind Cheesy and tapped him on the shoulder and inquired of him whether he would go along nice and quiet for a talk with the boss or was inclined to make a fuss about it. In either event, so Cheesy was assured, he, could have his wish gratified. And Cheesy, who had the heart of a rabbit--a rabbit feeding on other folks' cabbage, but a timorous, nibbling bunny for all that--Cheesy, he went.

In Toronto Marr peaked and pined. He probably was safe enough for so long as he bided there; there had been no newspaper publicity, and he felt reasonably sure that openly, at least, the aid of regular police departments would not be set in motion against him; so he put the thoughts of arrest and extradition and such like unpleasant contingencies out of his mind. But li'l' old N'York was his proper abiding place. The smell of its streets had a lure for him which no other city's streets had. His crowd was there--the folk who spoke his tongue and played his game. And there the gudgeons on which his sort fed schooled the thickest and carried the most savory fat on their bones as they skittered over the asphaltum shoals of the Main Stem.

For a month, emulating Uncle Remus' Brer Fox, he lay low, resisting the gnawing discontent that kept screening delectable visions of Broadway and the Upper Forties and Seventh Avenue before his homesick eyes. It was a real nostalgia from which he suffered. He endured it, though, with what patience he might lest a worse thing befall. And at the end of that month he went back to the big town; an overpowering temptation was the reason for his going. There had arisen a chance for a large turnover and a quick get-away again, with an attractively large sum to stay him and comfort him after he resumed his enforced exile. An emissary from the Gulwing mob ran up to Toronto and dangled the lure before his eyes.

Harbored in New York at the present moment was a beautiful prospect--a supremely credulous cattleman from the Far West, who had been playing the curb market. A crooks' tipster who was a clerk in a bucket shop downtown had for a price passed the word to the Gulwings, and the Gulwings--Sig and Alf--were intentful to strip the speculative Westerner before the curb took from him the delectable core of his bank roll. But the Gulwing organization, complete as it is in most essential details, lacked in its personnel for the moment a person of address to undertake the steering and the convincing--to worm a way into the good graces of the prospective quarry; to find out approximately about how much in dollars and cents he might reasonably be expected to yield, and then to stand by in the pose of a pretended fellow investor and fellow loser, while the cleaning up of the plunger was done by the competent but crude-mannered Messrs. Sigmund and Alfred Gulwing and their associates. For the important role of the convincer Marr was suited above all others. It was represented to him that he could slip back to town and, all the while keeping well under cover, rib up the customer to go, as the trade term has it, and then withdraw again to the Dominion. A price was fixed, based on a sliding scale, and Marr returned to New York.

Three days from the day he reached town the Westerner, whose name was Hartridge, lunched with him as his guest at the Roychester, a small, discreetly run hotel in Forty-sixth Street. After luncheon they sat down in the lobby for a smoke. For good and sufficient reasons Marr preferred as quiet a spot and as secluded a one as the lobby of the hotel might offer. He found it where a small red-leather sofa built for two stood in a sort of recess formed on one side by a jog in the wall and on the other side by the switchboard and the two booths which constituted the Roychester's public telephone equipment. To call the guest rooms one made use of an instrument on the clerk's desk, farther over to the left.

To this retreat Marr guided the big Oregonian. From it he had a fairly complete view of the lobby. This was essential since presently, if things went well or if they did not go well, he must privily give a designated signal for the benefit of a Gulwing underling, a lesser member of the mob, who was already on hand, standing off and on in the offing. Sitting there Marr was well protected from the view of persons passing through, bound to or from the grill room, the desk or the elevators. This also was as it should be. Better still, he was practically out of sight of those who might approach the telephone operator to enlist her services in securing outside calls. The outjutting furniture of her desk and the flanks of the nearermost pay booth hid him from them; only the top of the young woman's head was visible as she sat ten feet away, facing her perforated board.

The voices of her patrons came to him, and her voice as she repeated the numbers after them: "Greenwich 978, please."

"Larchmont 54 party J."

"Worth 9009, please, miss."

"Vanderbilt 100."

And so on and so forth, in a steady patter, like raindrops falling; but though he could hear he could not be seen. Altogether, the spot was, for his own purposes, admirably arranged.

So they sat and smoked, and pretty soon, the occasion and the conditions and the time being ripe, Marr outlined to his new friend Hartridge, on pledge of secrecy, a wonderfully safe and wonderfully simple plan for taking its ill-gotten money away from a Tenderloin pool room. Swiftly he sketched in the details; the opportunity, he divulged in strict confidence, had just come to him. He confessed to having taken a great liking to Hartridge during their short acquaintance; Hartridge had impressed him as one who might be counted upon to know a good thing when he saw it, and so, inspired by these convictions, he was going to give Hartridge a chance to join him in the plunge and share with him the juicy proceeds. Besides, the more money risked the greater the killing. He himself had certain funds in hand, but more funds were needed if a real fortune was to be realized.

There was need, though, for prompt decision on the part of all concerned, because that very afternoon--in fact, within that same hour--there in the Roychester he was to meet, by appointment, the conniving manager of an uptown branch office of the telegraph company, who would cooperate in the undertaking and upon whose good offices in withholding flashed race results at Belmont Park until his fellow conspirators, acting on the information, could get their bets down upon the winners, depended the success of the venture. Only, strictly speaking, it would not be a venture at all, but a moral certainty, a cinch, the surest of all sure things. Guaranties against mischance entailing loss would be provided; he could promise his friend Hartridge that; and the telegraph manager, when he came shortly, would add further proof.

The question then was: Would Hartridge join him as a partner? And if so, about how much, in round figures, would Hartridge be willing to put up? He must know this in advance because he was prepared to match Hartridge's investment dollar for dollar.

And at that Hartridge, to Marr's most sincere discomfiture, shook his head.

"I'll tell you how it is with me," said Hartridge. "These broker fellows downtown have been touchin' me up purty hard. I guess this here New York game ain't exactly my game. I'm aimin' to close up what little deals I've still got on here and beat it back to God's country while I've still got a shirt on my back. I'm much obliged to you, Markham, for wantin' to take me into your scheme. It sounds good the way you tell it, but it seems like ever'thing round this burg sounds good till you test it out--and so I guess you better count me out and find yourself a partner somewheres else."

There was definiteness in his refusal; the shake of his head emphasized it too. Marr's role should have been the persuasive, the insistent, the argumentative, the cajoling; but Marr was distinctly out of temper.

Here he had ventured into danger to play for a fat purse and all he would get for his trouble and his pains and the risk he had run would be just those things--pains and trouble and risk--these, and nothing more nourishing.

"Oh, very well then, Hartridge," he said angrily, "if you haven't any confidence in me--if you can't see that this is a play that naturally can't go wrong--why, we'll let it drop."

"Oh, I've got confidence in you--" began Hartridge, but Marr, no patience left in him, cut him short.

"Looks like it, doesn't it?" he snapped. "Forget it! Let's talk about the weather."

He lifted his straw hat as though to ease its pressure upon his head and then settled it well down over his eyes. This was the sign to the Gulwings' messenger, watching him covertly from behind a newspaper over on the far side of the lobby, that the plan had failed. The signal he had so confidently expected to give--a trick of relighting his cigar and flipping the match into the air--would have conveyed to the watcher the information that all augured well. The latter's job then would have been to get up from his chair and step outside and bear the word to Sig Gulwing, who, letter-perfect in the part of the conspiring telegraph manager, would promptly enter and present himself to Marr, and by Marr be introduced to the Westerner. The hat-shifting device had been devised in the remote contingency of failure on Marr's part to win over the chosen victim. Plainly the collapse of the plot had been totally unexpected by the messenger. Over his paper he stared at Marr until Marr repeated the gesture. Then, fully convinced now that there had been no mistake, the messenger arose and headed for the door, the whole thing--signaling, duplicated signaling and all--having taken very much less time for its action than has here been required to describe it.

The signal bearer had taken perhaps five steps when Hartridge spoke words which instantly filled Marr with regret that he had been so impetuously prompt to take a no for a no.

"Say, hold your hosses, Markham," said Hartridge contritely. "Don't be in such a hurry! Come to think about it, I might go so far as to risk altogether as much, say, as eight or ten thousand dollars in this scheme of yours--I don't want to be a piker."

In the hundredth part of a second Marr's mind reacted; his brain was galvanized into speedy action. Ten thousand wasn't very much--not nearly so much as he had counted on--still, ten thousand dollars was ten thousand dollars; besides, if the Gulwings did their work cannily the ten thousand ought to be merely a starter, an initiation fee, really, for the victim. Once he was enmeshed, trust Sig and Alf to trim him to his underwear; the machinery of the wire-tapping game was geared for just that.

He must stop the departing messenger then, must make him understand that the wrong sign had been given and that the fish was nibbling the bait. Yet the messenger's back was to them; ten steps, fifteen steps more, and he would be out of the door.

For Marr suddenly to hail a man he was supposed not to know might be fatal; almost surely at this critical moment it would stir up suspicion in Hartridge's mind. Yet some way, somehow, at once, he must stop the word bearer. But how? That was it--how?

Ah, he had it! In the fraction of a moment he had it. It came to him now, fully formed, the shape of it conjured up out of that jumble of words which had been flowing to him from the telephone desk all the while he had been sitting there and which had registered subconsciously in his quick brain. The pause, naturally spaced, which fell between Hartridge's 'bout-faced concession and Marr's reply, was not unduly lengthened, yet in that flash of time Marr had analyzed the puzzle of the situation and had found the answer to it.

"Bully, Hartridge!" he exclaimed. "You'll never regret it. Our man ought to be here any minute now.... By Jove! That reminds me--I meant to telephone for some tickets for to-night's Follies--you're going with me as my guest. Just a moment!"

He got on his feet and as he came out of the corner and still was eight feet distant from the telephone girl, he called out loudly, as a man might call whose hurried anxiety to get an important number made him careless of the pitch of his voice: "Worth 10,000! Worth 10,000!"

He feared to look toward the door--yet. For the moment he must seem concerned only with the hasty business of telephoning.

Annoyed by his shouting, the girl raised her head and stared at him as he came toward her.

"What's the excitement?" she demanded.

With enhanced vehemence he answered, putting on the key words all the emphasis he dared employ:

"I should think anybody in hearing could understand what I said and what I meant--_Worth 10,000_!"

He was alongside her now; he could risk a glance toward the door. He looked, and his heart rejoiced inside of him, for the messenger had swung about, as had half a dozen others, all arrested by the harshness of his words--and the messenger was staring at him. Marr gave the correct signal--with quick well-simulated nervousness drew a loose match from his waistcoat pocket, struck it, applied it to his cigar, then flipped the still burning match halfway across the floor. No need for him again to look--he knew the artifice had succeeded.

"Here's your number," said the affronted young woman. With a vicious little slam she stuck a metal plug into its proper hole.

Marr had not the least idea what concern or what individual owned Worth 10,000 for a telephone number. Nor did it concern him now. Even so, he must of course carry out the pretense which so well had served him in the emergency. He entered the booth, leaving the door open for Hartridge's benefit.

"Hello, hello!" he called into the transmitter. "This is V. C. Markham speaking. I want to speak to"--he uttered the first name which popped into his mind--"to George Spillane. Want to order some tickets for a show to-night." He paused a moment for the sake of the verities; then, paying no heed to the confused rejoinder coming to him from the other end of the wire, and improvising to round out his play, went on: "What's that?... Not there? Oh, very well! I'll call him later.... No, never mind, Spillane's the man I want. I'll call again."

He hung up the receiver. Out of the tail of his eye as he hung it up he saw Sig Gulwing just entering the hotel, in proper disguise for the character of the district telegraph manager with a grudge against pool rooms and a plan for making enough at one coup to enable him to quit his present job; the job was mythical, and the grudge, too--bits merely of the fraudulent drama now about to be played--but surely Gulwing was most solid and dependable and plausible looking. His make-up was perfect. To get here so soon after receiving the cue he must have been awaiting the word just outside the entrance. Gulwing was smart but he was not so smart as Marr--Marr exulted to himself. In high good humor, he dropped a dollar bill at the girl's elbow.

"Pay for the call out of that, miss, and keep the change," he said genially. "Sorry I was so boisterous just now."

Thirty minutes later, still radiating gratification, Marr stood at the cigar stand making a discriminating choice of the best in the humidor of imported goods. Gulwing and Hartridge were over there on the sofa, cheek by jowl, and all was going well.

Half aloud, to himself, he said, smiling in prime content: "Well, I guess I'm bad!"

"I guess you are!" said a voice right in his ear; "and you're due to be worse, Chappy, old boy--much worse!"

The smile slipped. He turned his head and looked into the complacent, chubby face and the pleased eyes of M. J. Brock, head of Brock's Detective Agency--the man of all men in this world he wished least to see. For once, anyhow, in his life Marr was shaken, and showed it.

"That's all right, Chappy," said Brock soothingly, rocking his short plump figure on his heels; "there won't be any rough stuff. I've got a cop off the corner who's waiting outside if I should need him--in case of a jam--but I guess we won't need him, will we? You'll go along with me nice and friendly in a taxicab, won't you?" He flirted his thumb over his shoulder. "And you needn't bother about Gulwing either. I've seen him--saw him as soon as I came in. I guess he'll be seeing me in a minute, too, and then he'll suddenly remember where it was he left his umbrella and take it on the hop."

Marr said not a word. Brock rattled on in high spirits, still maintaining that cat-with-a-mouse attitude which was characteristic of him.

"Never mind worrying about old pal Gulwing--I don't want him now. You're the one you'd better be worrying about; because that's going to be a mighty long taxi ride that you're going to take with me, Chappy--fifteen minutes to get there, say, and anywhere from five to ten years to get back--or I miss my guess.... Yes, Chappy, you're nailed with the goods this time. Propbridge is going through; his wife too. They'll go to court; they'll shove the case. And Cheesy Zaugbaum has come clean. Oh, I guess it's curtains for you all right, all right."

"You don't exactly hate yourself, do you?" gibed Marr. "Sort of pleased with yourself?"

"Not so much pleased with myself as disappointed in you, Chappy," countered the exultant Brock. "I figured you were different from the rest of your crowd, maybe; but it turns out you're like all the others--you will do your thinking in a groove." He shook his head in mock sorrow. "Chappy, tell me--not that it makes any difference particularly, but just to satisfy my curiosity--curiosity being my business, as you might say--what number was it you called up from here about thirty minutes back? Come on. The young lady over yonder will tell me if you don't. Was it Worth 10,000?"

"Yes," said Marr, "it was."

"I thought so," said Brock. "I guessed as much. But say Chappy, that's the trunk number of the Herald. Before this you never were the one to try to break into the newspapers on your own hook. What did you want with that number?"

"That's my business," said Marr.

"Have it your way," assented Brock with ironic mildness. "Now, Chappy, follow me a minute and you'll see how you dished your own beans: You call up Worth 10,000--that's a private matter, as you say. But Central gets the call twisted and gives you another number--that's a mistake. And the number she happens to give you is the number of my new branch office down in the financial district--that's an accident. And the fellow who answers the call at my shop happens to be Costigan, my chief assistant, who's been working on the Propbridge case for five weeks now--and that's a coincidence. He doesn't recognize your voice over the wire--that would be luck. But when, like a saphead, you pull your new moniker, but with the same old initials hitched to it, and when on top of that you ask for George Spillane, which is Cheesy by his most popular alias--when you do these things, why Chappy, it's your own fault.

"Because Costigan is on then, bigger than a house. You've tipped him your hand, see? And with our connections it's easy--and quick--for Costigan to trace the call to this hotel. And inside of two minutes after that he has me on the wire at my uptown office over here in West Fortieth. And here I am; as a matter of fact, I've been here all of fifteen minutes.

"It all proves one thing to me, Chappy. You're wiser than the run of 'em, but you've got your weak spot, and now I know what it is: You think in a groove, Chappy, and this time, by looking at the far end of the groove, you can see little old Warble-Twice-on-the-Hudson looming up. And you won't have to look very hard to see it, either.... Well, I see Gulwing has taken a tumble to himself and has gone on a run to look for his umbrella. Suppose we start on our little taxi ride, old groove thinker?"

[The end]
Irvin S. Cobb's short story: "Worth 10,000"

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