nding slenderly upright. Her head was imperiously high,
her black eyes defiant. Neither spoke at once. More than before was he
impressed by her present and her potential beauty. Till this night he
had thought of her only casually, as merely a young girl; he was not now
consciously in love with her--her young woman-hood had burst upon him
too suddenly for such a consciousness--but a warm tingling went through
him as he gazed at her imperious, self-confident youth. Part of his mind
was thinking much the same thought that Hunt had considered a few hours
earlier: here were the makings of a magnificent adventuress.

"Maggie," he mused, "you didn't get your looks from your father. You
must have had a fine-looking mother."

"I don't know--I never saw her," she returned shortly.

"Poor kid," Larry mused on--"and with only Old Jimmie for a father." She
did not know what to say. For a long time she had dreamed of this man as
her hero; she had dreamed of splendid adventures with him in which she
should win his praise. And now--and now--

He switched to another subject.

"So you have decided to string along with your father and Barney?"

"I have."

"Don't you do it, Maggie."

"Don't you preach, Larry."

"I'm not preaching. I'm just talking business to you. The same as I
talked business to myself. The crooked game is a poor business for a
woman who can do something else--and you can do something else. I've
known a lot of women in the crooked game. They've all had a rotten
finish, or are headed for one. So forget it, Maggie. There's more in the
straight game."

She had swiftly come to feel herself stronger and wiser than her
ex-hero. In her tremendous pride and confidence of eighteen, she
regarded him almost with pitying condescension.

"Something's softened your brain, Larry. I know better. The people who
pretend to go straight are just fakes; they're playing a different kind
of a smooth game, that's all. Everybody is out to get his, and get it
the easiest and quickest way he can. You know that's so. And that's just
what I am going to do."

Larry had once talked much the same way, but it seemed puzzlingly
strange just now to hear such talk from a young girl. Then he
understood.

"You couldn't help having such ideas, Maggie, living among crooks
ever since you were a kid. Why, Old Jimmie could not have used better
methods, or got better results, if he had set out consciously to make
you a crook." Then a sudden possibi