Aunt Dilsey called him oncet, speechifyin' to me 'bout
him--the ravelin' wolf. Only he suttinly did look he wuz comin'
unraveled mighty fast the last I seen of him."

CHAPTER VI

"WORTH 10,000"

You might have called Vincent C. Marr a self-made man and be making no
mistake about it. For he was self-made; not merely self-assembled, as so
many men are who attain distinction in this profession or that calling.
Entirely through his own efforts, with only his native wit to light the
way for him, he had pulled himself up, step by step, from the very
bottom of his trade to the very top of it. His trade was the applied
trade of crookedness; his pursuit the pursuit of other folks' cash
resources. He had the envy and admiration of his friends in allied
branches of the same general industry; he had the begrudged respect of
his official enemies, the police; while his accomplishments--the tricks
he pulled, the coups he scored, the purses he garnered--were discussed
and praised by the human nits and lice of the Seamy Side, just as the
achievements in a legitimate field of a Hill or a Schwab or a
Rockefeller might be talked of among petty shopkeepers and little
business men. He had, as the phrase goes, everything--imagination,
resource, ingenuity, audacity, utter ruthlessness.

Yet it would seem hard to conceive a more humble beginning than his had
been. His father was a cobbler in a little West Virginia coal town. At
sixteen he ran away from home to go with a small circus. This circus was
a traveling shield for all manner of rough extortioners. Card sharps,
shell workers, petermen, sneak thieves, pickpockets, even burglars rode
its train. They had a saying that the owner of this show sold the
safe-blowing privileges outright but retained a one-third interest in
the hold-up concession. That was a whimsical exaggeration of what
perhaps had a kern of truth in it. Certainly it was the fact of the case
that the owner depended more upon his lion's cut of the swag which the
trailing jackals amassed than upon the intake at the ticket windows. Bad
weather might kill his business for a week; a crop failure might lame it
for a month; but the graft was as sure as anything graftified can be.
When the runaway youth, Vince Marr, inserted himself beneath the
protecting wing of this patron he knew exactly whither his ultimate
ambitions tended. He had no vague boyish design to serve a 'prenticeship
as stake driver or roustabout in the hope