ractices and his police-court legal trickeries, of his gradual
identification with the poolroom interests and his first gleaning of
gambling-house lore, of his drifting deeper and deeper into this life
of unearned increment, of his fight with the Bar Association, which was
taken and lost before the Judiciary Committee of Congress, and of his
final offer of retainer from Penfield, and private and expert services
after the second raid on that gambler's Saratoga house. Frank could
understand why he said little of the purpose that took him to Europe.
Although she waited anxiously for any word he might let fall on that
subject, she respected his natural reticence in the matter. He was a
criminal, low and debased enough, it was true; but he was a criminal of
such apparent largeness of mind and such openness of spirit that his
very life of crime, to the listening woman, seemed to take on the
dignity of a Nietzsche-like abrogation of all civic and social ties.

Yet, in all his talk, he was open and frank enough in his confession of
attitude. He had seen too much of criminal life to have many illusions
or to make many mistakes about it. He openly admitted that the end of
all careers of crime was disaster--if not open and objective, at least
hidden and subjective. He had no love for it all. But when once,
through accident or necessity, in the game, he protested, there was but
one line of procedure, and that was to bring to illicit activity that
continuous intelligence which marked the conduct of those who stood
ready to combat it. Society, he declared, owed its safety to the fact
that the criminal class, as a rule, was made up of its least
intelligent members. When criminality went allied with a shrewd mind
and a sound judgment--and a smile curled about Keenan's melancholy
Celtic mouth as he spoke--it became transplanted, practically, to the
sphere and calling of high finance.

But if the defier of the Establish Rule preferred the simpler order of
things, he continued, his one hope lay in the power of making use of
his fellow-criminals, by applying to the unorganized smaller fry of his
profession some particular far-seeing policy and some deliberate
purpose, and through doing so standing remote and immune, as all
centres of generalship should stand.

This, he went on to explain, was precisely what Penfield had done, with
his art palaces and his European jaunts and his doling out of political
patronage and his prolonged