her, I do
know. It was because, when the deciding moment came, I was always
confronted by a vivid and soul-harrowing flash-light picture of Polly
Everton's face as it would look when they should tell her.

XIX

A Reckoning and a Hold-Up

I imagine it is only in fiction that a man is able to live a double
life successfully to the grand climax. I failed because the mounting
fortunes of the Little Clean-Up, my share of which was as yet merely
giving me money to squander on the extravagant whims and caprices of
Agatha Geddis, were making all three of us, Gifford, Barrett and
myself, marked men.

One incident of the marking timed itself in one of my trips to Denver.
I had breakfasted at the Brown and was leaving my room-key with the
clerk when I ran up against the plain-clothes man who had arrested me
on the day of my arrival as a runaway. I should have passed him
without recognition, as a matter of course, but he stopped and accosted
me.

"Carson's my name," he said, offering me his hand and showing his
concealed badge in one and the same motion. Then: "You'll excuse me
for butting in, Mr. Bertrand, but there is something you ought to know.
You've got a double kicking around here somewhere; a fellow who has
swiped your name and looks just a little like you. He's a crook, all
right, and we've got his thumb-print and his 'mug' in the headquarters
records. I ran across his dope the other day in the blotter, and
thought the next time I saw you I'd give you a tip. You never can tell
what these slick 'aliases' 'll do. He might be following you up to get
a graft out of you. That's done, every day, you know."

Naturally, there was nothing to do but to thank the purblind city
detective, to press a bank-note into his hand, and to beg him to be on
the lookout for this dangerous "double" of mine. But the incident
served to show what the bonanza-fed publicity campaign was doing for us.

Gifford, grubbing in the various levels of the mine, had the most
immunity; the newspaper reporters let him measurably alone. But
neither Barrett nor I could dodge the spotlight. Every move we made
was blazoned in type, and I lived in daily fear of the moment when some
enterprising newspaper man would begin to make copy of the theater
parties and road-house rides and midnight champagne suppers.

I knew that the blow had fallen one morning when Phineas Everton came
unannounced into my private office and asked me to send the
st