ll have the game. The world is dead easy,
if you take it on its blind side; easy living, easy money. Listen,
Weyburn, and I'll show you how you can climb into the bandwagon."

I listened because I could not well help it, being the man's wretched
beneficiary, in a sense. As he talked I felt the ground of good
resolutions slipping from beneath my feet. He was staging the old and
time-honored swindle--the gold-brick game--and he needed a confederate.
The fish was almost as good as landed, and with a little coaching I
could step in and clinch the robbery. Kellow proposed to stake me for
the clothes and the needful stage properties; and my knowledge of
banking and finance, limited as it was, would do the rest. It was a
cinch, he averred, and when it was pulled off we could divide the
spoils and vanish.

It was hardly a temptation. That word calls up a mental picture of
stern virtues assailed on every side and standing like a rock in a
storm. But, stripped of their poetic glamor, the virtues--and the
vices, for that matter,--are purely human; they can rise no higher or
sink no lower than the flesh-and-blood medium through which they find
their expression. The six months of hardship and humiliation which had
brought me to a pass at which I could eat a saloon luncheon at the
expense of a thief were pushing me over the brink. Kellow sat back in
his chair, smoking quietly, but I could feel his black eyes boring into
my brain. When he judged that the time was fully ripe, he drew a fat
roll of bank-notes from his pocket, stripped ten ten-dollar bills from
it and tossed them across the table to me.

"There's the stake, and here's the lay," said he, tersely. "Your
name's Smollett; you've struck it rich, and you're on your way home to
New York, we'll say, from your mine in Colorado. You're stopping at
the Marlborough, and we'll run across you accidentally--I and the
come-on--to-morrow forenoon in the hotel lobby. Get that?"

"I hear what you are saying."

"All right. Now for the preliminaries. Any all-night pawnbroker can
fit you out with a couple of grips and some clothes that will let you
dress the part--or at least let you into the hotel. Then, to-morrow
morning bright and early you can hit the ready-made tailors and blossom
out right as the honest miner spending some of his money for the glad
rags. I'm at the Marlborough myself--J. T. Jewett, Room 706--but, of
course, I won't know you; you'll just butt in as