was a skin. We risked our money fair."

"Prove it! Come up here, Eph Watts. Friends," the editor turned to the
crowd, smiling, "friends, here's a man we ran out of town once, because
he knew too much about things of this sort. He's come back to us again
and he's here to stay. He'll give us an object-lesson on the shell
game."

"It's pretty simple," remarked Mr. Watts. "The best way is to pick up
the ball with your second finger and the back part of your thumb as you
pretend to lay the shell down over it: this way." He illustrated, and
showed several methods of manipulation, with professional sang-froid;
and as he made plain the easy swindle by which many had been duped that
morning, there arose an angry and threatening murmur.

"You all see," said Harkless, raising his voice a little, "what a simple
cheat it is--and old as Pharaoh. Yet a lot of you stood around and lost
your own money, and stared like idiots, and let Hartley Bowlder lose
eighty-odd dollars on a shell racket, and not one of you lifted a hand.
How hard did you work for what these two cheap crooks took from you?
Ah!" he cried, "it is because you were greedy that they robbed you so
easily. You know it's true. It's when you want to get something for
nothing that the 'confidence men' steal the money you sweat for and
make the farmer a laughing stock. And _you_, Jim Bardlock, Town
Marshal!--you, who confess that you 'went in the game sixty cents'
worth, yourself--" His eyes were lit with wrath as he raised his
accusing hand and levelled it at the unhappy municipal.

The Town Marshal smiled uneasily and deprecatingly about him, and,
meeting only angry glances, hearing only words of condemnation, he
passed his hand unsteadily over his fat mustache, shifted from one
leg to the other and back again, looked up, looked down, and then, an
amiable and pleasure-loving man, beholding nothing but accusation and
anger in heaven and earth, and wishing nothing more than to sink into
the waters under the earth, but having no way of reaching them, finding
his troubles quite unbearable, and unable to meet the manifold eye of
man, he sought relief after the unsagacious fashion of a larger bird
than he. His burly form underwent a series of convulsions not unlike
sobs, and he shut his eyes tightly and held them so, presenting a
picture of misery unequalled in the memory of any spectator. Harkless's
outstretched hand began to shake. "You!" he tried to continue--"you, a
man el