nible puffiness in his skin--"Doc" Madison, gentleman
crook and high-class, polished con-man, who had lifted his profession to
an art, was still too young to be indelibly stamped with the hall-marks
of dissipation.

His gray eyes travelled from one to another, lingered an instant on
Helena, and came back to the Flopper.

"What's the trouble?" he demanded quietly.

It was Pale Face Harry who answered him.

"The Flopper's got it in for a couple of ginks that handed him one--a
bull and a chauffeur on a gape-wagon," he grinned, punctuating his words
with a cough. "The Flopper's got an idea the corpse-preserver's business
is dull, and he's going to help 'em out with two orders and pay for the
flowers himself."

Doc Madison shook his head and smiled a little grimly.

"Forget it, Flopper!" he said crisply. "I've something better for you to
do. You fade away, disappear and lay low from this minute. I don't care
what you do when you're resurrected, but from now on the three of you
are dead and buried, and the police go into mourning for at least six
months."

"What you got for us, Doc?--something nice?"--Helena pushed Pale Face
Harry and the Flopper unceremoniously out of her line of vision as she
spoke.

"Yes--the drinks. Cleggy's bringing them," Madison laughed--and opened
the door, as the tinkle of glass and a shuffling footstep sounded
without.

A man, big, hulking, thick-set and slouching, with shifty, cunning
little black eyes and the face of a bruiser, his nose bent over and
almost flattened down on one cheek, entered the room, carrying four
glasses on a tin tray. He set down the tray, and, as he lifted the
glasses from it and placed them on the table, he leered around at the
little group.

"Gee!" he said, sucking in his breath. "De Doc, an' Helena, an' Pale
Face, an' de Flopper! Gee, dis looks like de real t'ing--dis looks like
biz."

"It does--fifty-cents' worth--ten for yourself," said Doc Madison
suavely, flipping the coin into the tray. "Now, clear out!"

"Say"--Cleggy put his forefinger significantly to the side of his
nose--"say, can't youse let a sport in on--"

"Clear out!" Doc Madison broke in quite as suavely as before--but there
was a sudden glint of steel in the gray eyes as they held the bruiser's,
and Cleggy, hastily picking up the tray, scuffled from the room.

Madison watched the door close, then he began to pace slowly up and down
the room.

"Pull the chairs up to the table so we can