out of her. She realized that the clever play
which she had constructed so rapidly, and upon which she had counted to
clear the tangle for which she was in part responsible, and to bring
her back in time as the seeming fulfillment of the dream of a happy and
undisillusioned father--she realized that her poor, brilliant play
had come to an instant end before it was fairly started, and that the
control of events had passed into other hands.

CHAPTER XXXV

At the entrance of Joe Ellison instead of the expected Dick, Barney and
Old Jimmie had sprung up from the table in amazement. Joe strode past
Maggie, hardly heeding his daughter, and faced the two men.

"I guess you know me, Jimmie Carlisle!" said Joe with a terrifying
restraint of tone. "The pal I trusted--the pal I turned everything over
to--the pal who double-crossed me in every way!"

"Joe Ellison!" gasped Jimmie, suddenly as ghastly as a dead man. "I--I
didn't know you were out."

"I'm out, all right. But I'll probably go in again for what I'm going to
do to you! And you there"--turning on Barney--"you're got up enough like
a professional dancer to be the Barney Palmer I've heard of!"

"What business is it of yours who I am?" Barney tried to bluster.
"Perhaps you won't mind introducing yourself."

"I'm the man who's going to settle with you and Old Jimmie Carlisle! Is
that introduction enough. If not, then I'm Joe Ellison, the father of
this girl here you call Maggie Carlisle and Maggie Cameron, that you two
have made into a crook."

"Your daughter!" exclaimed Barney in stupefaction. "Why, she's Jimmie
Carlisle's--"

"He's always passed her off as such; that much I've learned. Speak
up, Jimmie Carlisle! Whose daughter is this girl you've turned into a
crook?"

"Your daughter, Joe," stammered Old Jimmie. "But about my making her
into a crook--you're--you're all wrong there."

"So she's not a crook, and you didn't make her one?" demanded Joe with
the calm of unexploded dynamite whose fuse is sputtering. "I left you
about twelve or fifteen hundred a year to bring her up on--as a decent,
respectable girl. That's twenty-five or thirty a week. If she's not a
crook, how can she on twenty-five a week have all the swell clothes
I've seen her in, and be living in a suite like this that costs from
twenty-five to fifty a day? And if she isn't a crook, why is she mixed
up with two such crooks as you? And if she isn't a crook, why is she in
a game to trim y