rstandingly, cast a sharp look at the opulent individual
in the brimless hat, and then hurried away toward the inner recesses of
the entrance. In a minute he was back, but not with determined police
officers behind him. He came alone and he carried in one hand a heavy
canvas bag that gave off a muffled jingling sound, and in the other, a
flat green packet.

The young woman riffled through the packet and drove a hand into the
jingling bag. Briskly she counted down before her the following items in
currency and specie:

Four one-hundred-dollar bills, six fifty-dollar bills, twelve
twenty-dollar bills, five ten-dollar bills, one five-dollar bill, four
one-dollar bills, one fifty-cent piece, one quarter, two dimes and one
nickel. Lifting one of the dimes off the top of this pleasing structure,
she dropped it in a drawer; then she shoved the remaining mound of
money under the wicket, accompanying it by a flat blue ticket of
admission, whisked the one-thousand-dollar bill out of sight and calmly
awaited the pleasure of the next comer.

All downcast and disappointed, Green drew his still bewildered
accomplice aside, relieved him of the bulk of his double handful of
change, endowed him liberally with cash for his trouble, and making his
way to where his car waited, departed in haste and silence for
Manhattan. A plan that was recommended by several of the leading fiction
authorities as infallible, had, absolutely failed him.

III

Other schemes proved equally disappointing. Choosing mainly the cool of
the evening, he travelled the town from the primeval forests of the
Farther Bronx to the sandy beaches of Ultimate Staten Island, which is
in the city, and yet not of it. He roamed through queer streets and
around quaint by-corners, and he learned much strange geography of his
city and yet had no delectable adventures.

Once, acting on the inspiration of the plot of a popular novel that he
had read at a sitting, he bought at an East Side pawnshop a strange
badge, or token, of gold and black enamel, all mysteriously embossed
over with intertwined Oriental signs and characters. Transferring this
ornament from the pawnshop window to the lapel of his coat, he went
walking first through the Syrian quarter, where the laces and the
revolutionary plots come from, and then through the Armenian quarter,
where the rugs come from, and finally in desperation through the Greek
quarter, where the plaster statues and the ripe bananas come