th
money. A man like that wants handling. I'm not telling you what I know.
But call it fifty-fifty and maybe you'll come out alive."

The brow of Diamond Fred displayed beads of perspiration, and with
a blue silk handkerchief which he carried in his breast pocket he
delicately dried his forehead.

"You're an old hand at this stuff, Jim," he muttered. "It amounts to
this, I suppose; that if I don't agree you'll queer my game?"

Jim Poland's brow lowered and he clenched his fists formidably. Then:

"Listen," he said in his hoarse voice. "It ain't your claim any more
than mine. You've covered it different, that's all. Yours was always the
petticoat lay. Mine's slower but safer. Is anyone else in with you?"

"No."

"Then we'll double up. Now I'll tell you something. I was backing out."

"What? You were going to quit?"

"I was."

"Why?"

"Because the thing's too dead easy, and a thing like that always looks
like hell to me."

Freddy Cohen finished his glass of whisky.

"Wait while I get some more drinks," he said.

In this way, then, at about the hour of ten on a stuffy autumn night, in
the crowded bar of that Wapping public-house, these two made a
compact; and of its outcome and of the next appearance of Cohen, the
Jewish-American cracksman, within the ken of man, I shall now proceed to
tell.

II

THE END OF COHEN

"I've been expecting this," said Chief Inspector Kerry. He tilted his
bowler hat farther forward over his brow and contemplated the ghastly
exhibit which lay upon the slab of the mortuary. Two other police
officers--one in uniform--were present, and they treated the celebrated
Chief Inspector with the deference which he had not only earned but had
always demanded from his subordinates.

Earmarked for important promotion, he was an interesting figure as
he stood there in the gloomy, ill-lighted place, his pose that of an
athlete about to perform a long jump, or perhaps, as it might have
appeared to some, that of a dancing-master about to demonstrate a new
step.

His close-cropped hair was brilliantly red, and so was his short, wiry,
aggressive moustache. He was ruddy of complexion, and he looked out
unblinkingly upon the world with a pair of steel-blue eyes. Neat he
was to spruceness, and while of no more than medium height he had the
shoulders of an acrobat.

The detective who stood beside him, by name John Durham, had one trait
in common with his celebrated superior. This was