d
you here in the morning just as if nothing had happened. How Is that
for guesswork?"

"You go tahell!" growled Casey, swallowing a sickly grin. He pressed
down the tobacco in his pipe, eyeing Nolan queerly. "If them damn'
lizards had uh let yuh alone, I wouldn't have nothin' on m' mind now
but my hat." He looked across the fire and grinned again.

"Keep on; you'll be tellin' me what the missus an' I was arguin' about
last night over long-distance. I've heard tell uh this four-bit mind
reading an' forecastin' your horrorscope fer a dime; but I never met up
with it before. If you're aimin' to take up a collection after the
show, you'll fare slim. I've been what a feller called 'dusted off'."
He added, after a pause that was eloquent, "They done it thorough!"

Mack Nolan laughed. "They usually are thorough, when they're 'dusting
off a chump', as I believe they call it."

Casey grunted. "'Chump' is right, mebby. But anyways, you're too
late, Mr. Nolan. I'm cleaned."

Mack Nolan rolled another cigarette, lighted it and flipped the match
into the campfire. He smoked it down to the last inch, staring into
the fire and saying nothing the while. When the cigarette stub
followed the match, he leaned back upon one elbow and began tracing a
geometrical figure in the sand with a stick.

"Ryan," he said abruptly, "you're square and I know it. The very
nature of my business makes me cautious about trusting men--but I'm
going to trust you." He stopped again, taking great pains with the
point of a triangle he was drawing.

Casey knocked the ashes out of his pipe against a rock. "Puttin' it
that way, Mr. Nolan, the man's yet to live that Casey Ryan ever
double-crossed. Cops I got no use for; nor yet bootleggers. Whether I
got any use for you, Mr. Nolan, I can say better when I've heard yuh
out. A goat I've been for the last time. But I'm willin' to HEAR yuh
out--and that there's more'n what I'd uh said this morning."

"And that's fair enough, Ryan. If you jumped into things with your
eyes shut, I don't think I'd want you with me."

Casey squirmed, remembering certain times when he had gone too headlong
into things.

"I'm going to ask you, Ryan, to tell me the whole story of this car and
its load of whisky. Before you do that, I'll tell you this much to
show good faith and prove to you how much I trust you: I'm an officer,
and my special work right now is to clean up a gang of bootleggers and
the crooked