re, made ample amends, for having gulped down one ominously
generous glass of the fiery liquid, he poured another, and still
another, into the cavern of his pendulous throat, with repeated
grateful smacks of the thick and purplish lips.

"Now, I'm goin' to show you round a bit, just to make it plain to you,
before business begins for the day. I want you to see that you're not
shut up in any quarter-inch cedar bandbox!"

He took her familiarly by the arm and led her to a door which, like the
others, was covered with a plating of steel, and heavily locked and
barred.

"Necessity, you see, is still the mother of invention," he said, as his
finger played on the electric signal and released the obstructing door.
"If we're goin' to do poolroom work, nowadays, we've got to do it big
and comprehensive, same as Morgan or Rockefeller would do their line o'
business. You've got to lay out the stage, nowadays, to carry on the
show, or something'll swallow you up. Why, when we worked our last
wire-tapping scheme with a hobo from St. Louis, who was rotten with
money, we escorted him, on two hours' notice, into as neat a lookin'
Postal-Union branch office as you'd care to see, with half a dozen fake
keys a-goin' and twenty actors and supers helpin' to carry off the act.
_That's_ the up-to-date way o' doin' it! That's how a man like
Penfield makes this kind o' graftin' respectable and aboveboard and
just about as honest as bein' down in the Cotton Exchange!"

He was leading her down a narrow hallway, four feet wide, with unbroken
walls on either side of them. At the end of this still another armored
door led into a medium-sized room, as bald and uninviting as a
dentist's waiting-room. Here he led her to two horizontal slits in the
wall and told her to look down.

She did so, and found herself peering below, out into the well-stocked
cigar-store, with a clear view of the entrance.

"That's the conning-tower of this here little floating fortress,"
chuckled MacNutt, at her shoulder. "This place you're in is
steel-lined, and it would take three hours o' chisel and sledge work
for anybody, from Eggers up to Braugham himself, to get inside, even
though he did find us out, and even though he did escape the sulphuric
bottles between the bricks. Each one o' these little slits is in line
with a nice gilded cigar sign on the shop side of the wall. So no one
down there, you see, knows who's eyin' them. _We_ don't need any
lookout,