vaguely, that he was under the keen eyes of the stranger across the table from him.

“Where’d you work, before you went to the Postal-Union?”

“Up in the woods,” laughed the other carelessly, yet still clear-headed enough to feel inwardly ashamed of his laughter.

“What woods?”

“Up in Ontario. I was despatcher, and station-agent, and ticket-seller, and snow-shoveller, and lamp-cleaner, and everything else, for the Grand Trunk at Komoka, where the Tunnel trains cut off from the main line west for Chicago,—and where they still keep their heel on the Union, and work their men like dogs. They paid me forty-two dollars a month—which was small enough!—but out of that salary they deducted any bad money taken in through the ticket-window, when my returns were made up. I was two weeks behind in my board bill when a Port Huron drummer bought a ticket through to Hamilton with a twenty-dollar counterfeit. It came back to me, with my next month’s twenty-two dollars, with ‘Counterfeit’ stencilled out in big letters across the face of it. The loss of that money kind of got on my nerves. I fumed and worried over it until I spoilt my ‘send,’ and couldn’t sleep, and in some way or other threw an Oddfellows’ excursion train into a string of gravel empties! My God, what I went through that night! I knew it, I foresaw it, twenty minutes before they touched. I pounded the brass between the Junction and Sarnia until they thought I was crazy, but we had no way of getting at them, any more than we could get at two comets rushing together. I wired in my resign. I didn’t even wait to get my clothes. I struck out and walked across country to St. Thomas, and boarded a Michigan Central for the Bridge!”

The older man watched the nervous hands go up to the moist forehead and wipe away the sweat, but the gesture left him unmoved.

“Then how’d you come to leave the Postal-Union?” he asked.

A look of momentary resentment leaped into Durkin’s eyes.

“They blacklisted me!” he confessed. “And just for playing their own game!”

The other held up a warning finger.

“Not so loud,” he interrupted. “But go on!”

“Of course, when I first came down to New York I went into the P. U. ‘carrying a fly.’ So I was treated fairly enough, in a way. But I had telegrapher’s paralysis coming on, and I knew I was losing time on my amplifier, and I had to have money for my new transmitter experiments. I tried to make it up doing over-time, and used to shoot weird codes along Continental Press Association’s leased wires until I got so neurasthenic that the hay-tossers up state would break and ask me to fill in, and then I used to lose my temper and wonder why I didn’t stab myself with a flimsy-hook. I knew I had to give it up, but I did want enough money to carry along my work with!”

He hesitated for a moment, still gazing down at his plate, until his companion looked at his watch with a brusque “Go on!”

“So I tried another way. When some of the Aqueduct races were going through, on a repeater next to my key, up to Reedy’s pool-rooms, I just reached over and held up one side of the repeater. Then, say third horse won, I strolled to the window and took out my handkerchief three times. My confederate ’phoned to our man, and when he’d had time to get his money up I let the result go through. But they discovered the trick, and called me up on the carpet. And all the rest, you know!”

He shook his head lugubriously; then he laughed aloud with a shrug of the insouciant shoulder; then he added, regretfully, “I’d have made a clear five hundred, if they’d only given me another day’s chance!”

“Well, I guess maybe you can even up, with us!” And the stranger shook his own head, knowingly, and returned the gaze of the younger man, who was peering at him narrowly, unsteady of eye, but still alertly suspicious. Even in that shadowy substratum to which he had been temporarily driven, good grafts, he knew, had to be sought for long and arduously. And he had no love for that ever-furtive underworld and its follies. It was a life that rested on cynicism, and no man could be a cynic and live. That he knew. He nursed no illusions as to the eventual triumph of evil, in the ever-shifting order of things earthly; and he remembered, with a sting of apprehension, the joy with which he had plunged into the thick of that street-corner group of untainted fellow-men.

“I think I’d rather get at something decent again,” he grumbled, pushing away his bean-plate, but still waiting, with a teasing sense of anxiety, for the other to explain more fully.

“I guess we’d all like to shy around the dirty work,—but a dead sure thing’s good enough now and then.”

“But where’s all the money, in this cinch?” demanded Durkin, a little impatiently.

“I can’t cackle about that here, but I tell you right now, I’m no piker! Get into a taxi with me, and then I’ll lay everything out to you as we drive up to the house. But here, have a smoke,” he added as he got up and hurried to the door that opened on the side street. Durkin had never dreamed that tobacco—even pure Havana tobacco—could be so suave and mellow and fragrant as that cigar.

“Now, you asked me about the money in this deal,” the older man began, when he had slammed the taxi door and they went scurrying toward Fifth Avenue. “Well, it’s right here, see!”—and as he spoke he drew a roll of bills from his capacious trousers-pocket. From an inner coat-pocket that buttoned with a flap he next took out a pig-skin wallet, and flicked the ends of his paper wealth before Durkin’s widening eyes. The latter could see that it was made up of one hundreds, and fifties, and twenties, all neatly arranged according to denomination. He wondered, dazedly, just how many thousands it held. It seemed, of a sudden, to put a new and sobering complexion on things.

“Money talks!” was the older man’s sententious remark, as he restored the wallet to its pocket.

“Undoubtedly!” said Durkin, leaning back in the cushioned seat.

“Now, if you want to swing in with us, here’s what you get a week.”

The stranger took the smaller roll from his trousers-pocket again, and drew out four crisp fifty dollar bills. These he placed on the palm of the other man’s hand, and watched the hesitating fingers slowly close on them. “And if our coup goes through, you get your ten per cent. rake-off,—and that ought to run you up from five to seven thousand dollars, easy!”

Durkin’s fingers closed more tightly on his bills, and he drew in his gin-laden breath, sharply.

“Who are you, anyway?” he asked, slowly.

“Me? Oh, I’m kind of an outside operator, same as yourself!”

He looked at Durkin steadily, for a moment, and then, seemingly satisfied, went on in a different tone.

“Did you ever hear of Penfield, the big pool-room man, the gay art connoisseur, who hob-nobs with a bunch of our Wall Street magnates and saunters over to Europe a couple o’ times a season? Well, I’ve been a plunger at Penfield’s now for two months—just long enough to make sure that he’s as crooked as they make ’em. I’m going to give him a dose of his own medicine, and hit that gilt-edged gambler for a slice of his genteel bank-roll—and an uncommon good, generous slice, too!”

“But what’s—er—your