for everything in
the bill that he sends by the patrol wagon to the altar where the duke
is about to marry the heiress.

But old Badville-near-Coney is the ideal burg for a refined piece of
piracy if you can pay the bunco duty. Imported grafts come pretty
high. The custom-house officers that look after it carry clubs, and
it's hard to smuggle in even a bib-and-tucker swindle to work Brooklyn
with unless you can pay the toll. But now, me and Buck, having
capital, descends upon New York to try and trade the metropolitan
backwoodsmen a few glass beads for real estate just as the Vans did a
hundred or two years ago.

At an East Side hotel we gets acquainted with Romulus G. Atterbury, a
man with the finest head for financial operations I ever saw. It was
all bald and glossy except for gray side whiskers. Seeing that head
behind an office railing, and you'd deposit a million with it without
a receipt. This Atterbury was well dressed, though he ate seldom; and
the synopsis of his talk would make the conversation of a siren sound
like a cab driver's kick. He said he used to be a member of the Stock
Exchange, but some of the big capitalists got jealous and formed a
ring that forced him to sell his seat.

Atterbury got to liking me and Buck and he begun to throw on the
canvas for us some of the schemes that had caused his hair to
evacuate. He had one scheme for starting a National bank on $45 that
made the Mississippi Bubble look as solid as a glass marble. He talked
this to us for three days, and when his throat was good and sore we
told him about the roll we had. Atterbury borrowed a quarter from us
and went out and got a box of throat lozenges and started all over
again. This time he talked bigger things, and he got us to see 'em
as he did. The scheme he laid out looked like a sure winner, and he
talked me and Buck into putting our capital against his burnished dome
of thought. It looked all right for a kid-gloved graft. It seemed to
be just about an inch and a half outside of the reach of the police,
and as money-making as a mint. It was just what me and Buck wanted--a
regular business at a permanent stand, with an open air spieling with
tonsilitis on the street corners every evening.

So, in six weeks you see a handsome furnished set of offices down
in the Wall Street neighborhood, with "The Golconda Gold Bond and
Investment Company" in gilt letters on the door. And you see in his
private room, with the door open, the s