e limit which I'm allowing myself in this affair. You're a
little slow, Chub--just a bit slow in grasping the possibilities,
aren't you? Think a minute! Put your mind upon it, man! I've told you
I am going to pay Dennison off--and pay him with the same coin that he
handed me. Doesn't that mean anything at all?"

He stopped short, crossed to the table and stood with his fingertips
bracketed upon its surface. Morehouse knew Hogarty--knew him as did
few other men, unless, perhaps, it was those who, years before, had
faced him in the ring. And at that moment Hogarty's eyes were mere
slits in his face as he stood and peered down into the newspaper man's
upturned features, his mouth like nothing so much as a livid scar
above his chin. There was nothing of mirth in those eyes, nothing of
merriment in that tight mouth, and yet as he sat and gazed back up at
them, Morehouse's own lips began to twitch. They began to relax. That
wide grin spread to the very corners of his eyelids and half hid his
delighted comprehension behind a thousand tiny wrinkles.

"I wonder," he breathed, "I wonder now, Flash, if you are thinking
about the same thing I am? For if you are--well, you're too sober
faced. You are that! It's time to indulge in a little hysterics."

And he began to chuckle; he sat and shook with muffled spasms of
absolute joy as the thing became more and more vivid with each new
thought. Even Hogarty's answering smile, coming from reluctant lips,
had in it something of sympathetic mirth.

"That's just what I am thinking," he said. "Just that! It's what I
meant when I said I was going to pay him--with his own coin. When a
man plays another man crooked, he expects that other man to come back
at him some day; he is looking for him to do that. But there is one
thing he doesn't expect--not usually. He isn't looking for him to work
the same old game. It is something new he's looking to guard against.

"And that is where Dennison is weak--in that spot and one other. He
doesn't know even yet that when I fell for his game I fell hard enough
to wake me up. He thinks I haven't a suspicion but what it was just an
accident that laid Sutton out, two years back--just a lucky punch of
The Red's that went across and spoiled our perfect frame-up. And he
hasn't a suspicion that I know he was sure The Red was going to clean
up Sutton, just as surely as they went to the ring together.

"That is where he is weak. When a man is a crook he wants to