suspicious, did not know that under the table, close to her
foot, was the push button of an electric bell. He had never heard of
such a contrivance, and his keenness and wariness went for naught.

"It's like this, Miss," he began, in response to her urging. "Old
Setliffe done me up in a little deal once. It was raw, but it worked.
Anything will work full and legal when it's got few hundred million
behind it. I'm not squealin', and I ain't taking a slam at your pa.
He don't know me from Adam, and I reckon he don't know he done me outa
anything. He's too big, thinking and dealing in millions, to ever hear
of a small potato like me. He's an operator. He's got all kinds of
experts thinking and planning and working for him, some of them, I hear,
getting more cash salary than the President of the United States. I'm
only one of thousands that have been done up by your pa, that's all.

"You see, ma'am, I had a little hole in the ground--a dinky, hydraulic,
one-horse outfit of a mine. And when the Setliffe crowd shook down
Idaho, and reorganized the smelter trust, and roped in the rest of the
landscape, and put through the big hydraulic scheme at Twin Pines, why
I sure got squeezed. I never had a run for my money. I was scratched
off the card before the first heat. And so, to-night, being broke and my
friend needing me bad, I just dropped around to make a raise outa your
pa. Seeing as I needed it, it kinda was coming to me."

"Granting all that you say is so," she said, "nevertheless it does not
make house-breaking any the less house-breaking. You couldn't make such
a defense in a court of law."

"I know that," he confessed meekly. "What's right ain't always legal.
And that's why I am so uncomfortable a-settin' here and talking with
you. Not that I ain't enjoying your company--I sure do enjoy it--but I
just can't afford to be caught. I know what they'd do to me in this here
city. There was a young fellow that got fifty years only last week for
holding a man up on the street for two dollars and eighty-five cents. I
read about it in the paper. When times is hard and they ain't no work,
men get desperate. And then the other men who've got something to be
robbed of get desperate, too, and they just sure soak it to the other
fellows. If I got caught, I reckon I wouldn't get a mite less than ten
years. That's why I'm hankering to be on my way."

"No; wait." She lifted a detaining hand, at the same time removing her
foot from the