nd for me. My father had made a stake by a forgery; checks on the
City bank. I knew where the money was hid, eight thousand and seventy
nine dollars. It would just about do me. I framed the old man--I told
you he was in Sing Sing now--took my working capital and came out here
to the Coast. That money had to make me rich for life, respected,
comfortable. I figured that my game was as safe as dummy whist."

"Yeh," said Roll Winchell, the marshal, gloomily, "them high-toned
Eastern crooks always comin' out here thinkin' they'll find the Coast a
soft snap."

"Two years I worked as a messenger for the San Francisco Trust Company,"
Clayte's voice ran right on past Winchell's interruption, "a model
employee, straight as they come; then decided they were too big for me
to tackle, and used their recommendation to get a clerk's job with the
Van Ness Avenue concern. I was after the theft of at least a half
million dollars, with a perfect alibi; and the smaller institution
suited my plan. It took me four years to work up to paying teller, but I
wasn't hurrying things. I was using my capital now to build that perfect
alibi."

He glanced around nervously as the stenographer turned a leaf, then went
on,

"I'd picked out this town for the home of the man I was going to be. It
suited me, because it was on a branch line of the railway, hardly used
at all by men whose business was in the city, and off the main highway
of automobile travel; besides, I liked the place--I've always liked it."

"Sure flattered," came the growl as Winchell stirred in his chair.

"My bungalow and grounds cost me four thousand; at that it was a
run-down place and I got it cheap. The mahogany--old family pieces that
I was supposed to bring in from the East--came high. Yet maybe you'd be
surprised how the idea took with me. I used to scrimp and save off my
salary at the bank to buy things for the place, to keep up the right
scale of living for Bronson Vandeman, traveling agent for eastern
manufacturers, not at home much in Santa Ysobel yet, but a man of fine
family, rich prospects, and all sorts of a good fellow, settled in the
place for the rest of his days."

He turned suddenly and grinned at me.

"You swallowed it whole, Boyne, when you walked into my house last
night--the old family furniture I bought in Los Angeles, the second-hand
library, that family portrait, with a ring on my finger, and the same
painted in on what was supposed to be my father's