smile as we settled our stenographer and took chairs ourselves.

"I look like hell--what?" He spoke fast as a man might with a drink
ahead. But it was not alcohol that was loosening his tongue. "Why can't
some one go up to my place and get me a decent suit of clothes? God
knows I've plenty there--closets full of them."

"Time enough when th' Shurff gets here," Roll Winchell, the town
marshall grunted at him. "I'm not taking any chances on you, Mr.
Vandeman. You'll do me as you are."

"Stick a smoke in my face, Cummings," came next in a voice that twanged
like a stretched string. "Damn these bracelets! Light it, can't you?
Light it." He puffed eagerly, got to his feet and began walking up and
down the room, glancing at us from time to time, raising the manacled
hands grotesquely to his cigar, drawing in a breath as though to speak,
then shaking his head, grinning a little and walking on. I knew the
mood; the moment was coming when he must talk. The necessity to reel out
the whole thing to whomever would listen was on him like a sneeze. It's
always so at this stage of the game.

For all the hullabaloo in the streets, we were quiet enough here, since
the lock-up at Santa Ysobel lurks demurely, as such places are apt to
do, in the rear of the building whose garbage can it is. Our pacing
captive could keep silent no longer. Shooting a sidelong glance at me,
he broke out,

"I'm not a common crook, Boyne, even if I do come of a family of them,
and my father's in Sing Sing. I put him there. They'd not have caught
him without. He was an educated man--never worked anything but big
stuff. At that, what was the best he could do--or any of them? Make a
haul, and all they got out of it was a spell of easy money that they
only had the chance to spend while they were dodging arrest. Sooner or
later every one of them I knew got put away for a longer or shorter
term. Growing up like that, getting my education in the public schools
daytimes, and having a finish put on it nights with the gang, I decided
that I was going to be, not honest, but the hundredth man--the
thousandth--who can pull off a big thing and neither have to hide nor go
to prison."

This was promising; a little different from the ordinary brag; I
signaled inconspicuously to our stenographer to keep right on the job.

"When I was twenty-four years old, I saw my chance to shake the gang and
try out my own idea," Clayte rattled it off feelinglessly. "It was a
lone ha