ake any comment.

"I'll be right behind you in everything, and so will Jimmie," Barney
continued in his exciting manner--"but you'll be the party out in front
who really puts the proposition over. And we'll keep to things where the
police can't touch us. Get a man with coin and position tangled up right
in a deal with a woman, and he'll never let out a peep and he'll come
across with oodles of money. Hundreds of ways of working that. A strong
point about you, Maggie, is you have no police record. Neither have I,
though the police suspect me--but, as I said, I'll keep off the stage
as much as I can. I tell you, Maggie, we're going to put over some great
stuff! Great, I tell you!"

Maggie felt no repugnance to what had been said and implied by Barney.
How could she, when since her memory began she had lived among people
who talked just these same things? To Maggie they seemed the natural
order. At that moment she was more concerned by a fascinating necessity
which Barney's flamboyant enterprise entailed.

"But to do anything like that, won't I need clothes?"

"You'll need 'em, and you'll have 'em! You're going to have one of
the swellest outfits that ever happened. You'll make Paris ashamed of
itself!"

"No use blowing the whole roll on Maggie's clothes," put in Old Jimmie,
speaking for the first time.

Barney turned on him caustically, almost savagely. "You're a hell of a
father, you are--counting the pennies on his own daughter! I told you
this was no piker's game, and you agreed to it--so cut out the idea
you're in any nickel-in-the-slot business!"

Old Jimmie felt physical pain at the thought of parting from money on
such a scale. His earlier plans concerning Maggie had never contemplated
any such extravagance. But he was silenced by the dominant force behind
Barney's sarcasm.

"Miss Grierson--she's your companion--knows what's what about clothes,"
continued Barney to Maggie. "Here's the dope as I've handed it to her.
You're an orphan from the West, with some dough, who's come to New York
as my ward and Jimmie's and we want you to learn a few things. To her
and to any new people we meet I'm your cousin and Jimmie is your uncle.
You've got that all straight?"

"Yes," said Maggie.

"You're to use another name. I've picked out Margaret Cameron for you.
We can call you Maggie and it won't be a slip-up--see? If any of the
coppers who know you should tumble on to you, just tell 'em you dropped
your own name so'