the scene with Flora, smiled ironically.

"A poor man calls in a lawyer to defend him," continued Bofinger, whom the thought of injustice aroused. "A rich man's lawyer plans for him how to escape arrest. What's the difference? A million, that's all! With a million anything is respectable."

"It is," took up LeBeau, in haste to air his opinions on that topic. "Why? With a million direct responsibility ceases. You no longer need to steal in person, you break laws by proxy. Justice does not yet recognize indirect responsibility. A million—there's our standard! Make it anyway. So long as the track is masked society will judge you only by the way you use it. At the bottom of all is this," he summed up, pulling out his watch: "The world abhors petty sinning. Take a ten-dollar bribe, you are despicable. Distribute on election day one hundred thousand dollars for bribery and you are a leader of men. Take one life—murder! Sacrifice a thousand lives for a commercial advantage, you are a captain of industry! Crime is in the motive and the scale. When a man steals from hunger or kills for revenge the motive is evident and the guilt apparent. But for ambition, for fame, for supremacy—the motive is human and grandiose. The grand scale precludes the crime! You are right, Bo, you are right there. The million's everything!"

"Yes," Bofinger said pensively, whistling on his fingers, "but to get that first essential million you've got to run some risks."

"Otherwise life would be too easy," LeBeau said with a smile. "The only difficulty to-day is, as you say, to get the first million."

"It is all luck," Bofinger said moodily, and he remained silent, his gaze plunged into the street.

LeBeau scrutinized him, smiling at the appetite he had awakened, seeing the man in the bare, and wondering if there were any crime before which such a nature would retreat, were it once a question of the opportunity he coveted. He woke his companion, who jumped up rubbing his eyes, asking:

"Well, are you through with your honest man?"

"True, we had forgotten him," LeBeau said, glancing at Bofinger.

"Bo, good news!" Ganzler cried, looking through the window. "I see a client."

Across the street a little man, clad in black from a shovel hat to a cloak which he carried slung over his shoulder, was examining undecidedly the row of lawyers' offices. The shoulders, which were unusually broad, so diminished his size that they gave him the look of a dwarf. It was an odd figure, incongruous in the street, with an air of belonging to the traditions of the stage. The two reporters, amusing themselves at his expense, decided successively that he was a bandit, a barber, an actor, a magician, a poet, and an engraver of tombstones.

"There he goes," cried Ganzler. "He's frightened off. He's guilty!"

"Maybe it was the honest man after all," said LeBeau, laughing. "Only honesty looks guilty nowadays. Too bad, that was your chance. Beware the honest man, though!"

The two reporters departed for the court after helping themselves to cigars. Immediately from the back of the room a voice cried peremptorily:

"Alonzo, you talk too damn much!"

"What of it?" Bofinger said, wincing under his chief's reproof. "I only told them what they knew."

"Say nothing and you risk nothing."

Extricating himself from his seat Groll moved into the light, discovering the shoulders of a hunchback, a massive bust on legs which were weak, ill-matched, and pitiful.

The heavy head fell from the high cheekbones and the yellowish eyes, which bulged like marbles, along the bold and fleshy nose to a lengthened jaw where the folded lips adhered to each other as though to repress all indiscreet speech. It was an unusual face, vacuous and immobile, that seemed to contain instead of blood some fishy fluid, which left it incapable of emotion.

On settling into his seat his arms sprawled over the desk, bracing the weight of the head and shoulders on the elbows, while from the mass the eyes, vacant and magnetic, conveyed to Bofinger for the thousandth time the impression of an immense spider in the center of its web.

Physical deformity has an extreme effect on human nature. Either it produces an heroic and resigned optimism, or it forms, by divesting them of the passions which shackle men, characters of implacable selfishness, who are strong because they were born weak and know no pity because nature has shown them none.

Calculating and self-absorbed, Groll was yet not of those gamblers who, staking all at each leap, infrequently arrive through desire and infatuated confidence to heights seemingly beyond their force. He moved slowly to his end, with that unhuman oriental patience which, allied to the imagination of the American, forms in its rare conjunction characters that death alone can thwart. He knew how to bide his time without, as commonly occurs, the waiting consuming him. At thirty-eight, age when the American reckons his life a success or a failure, he had not lost a whit of his complacency. He had never known youth, he had not therefore been disturbed by its pangs for instant preeminence.

With all that he was approaching forty a shyster lawyer, living on the blackmail he shared with the police. The future did not seem to hold anything further. Nevertheless, he had forced a career even out of this slough of petty misery. He had begun by examining carefully the problem of vice and the law, asking himself anxiously if the system of blackmail was transitory. He soon became convinced that so long as public sentiment would not admit that vice exists and legalize it, vice must exist through corruption. He then conceived an audacious plan, which was no less than to unite under one system, with himself as the head, all the traffic in blackmail which then filtered through a thousand intersecting channels. The man who could achieve such an organization, he saw would dominate the city so long as he was content to remain obscure. Towards this end he had moved irresistibly, picking his associates and his agents, biding only the moment when his fortune would permit him to launch the system on a grand scale. So well had he locked up in his own breast the secret of this gigantic plan that Bofinger himself did not suspect it.

In character he was frugal, temperate, and peaceful, without vices or distractions, qualities which in another man would have been virtues, so strangely does the controlling motive determine betwixt virtue and vice. Born three centuries ago he might have been a bigot, pursuing religion with the same fanaticism which he brought to the conquest of his present design.

Bofinger continuing to defend himself, Groll interrupted decisively:

"One is never strong enough to be confident. Only a fool feels secure. Talk to Ganzler who is one of us—but not to LeBeau, who for a sensation might write us up and bring everything tumbling about our ears! Also don't show your hand! Play close to your chest." He stopped, considered his associate, and perceiving the reproof was felt, added: "Now for business. What did they say at that new joint in Eighteenth Street?"

Bofinger, who had taken his scolding like a guilty schoolboy, hastened gratefully to the opening, saying:

"They won't give up a cent."

"Did you make clear our pull?"

"Yes."

"What, do they think they can operate in this district for nothing?"

"That seems to be it."

"We'll have it raided to-night," Groll said thoughtfully but without irritation. "We must make an