d--I've got a
photograph way home in Brooklyn to prove it--I had golden hair in long
ringlets!"

Malinkoff chuckled softly.

"This is the American who held up Tcherekin and nearly got away with ten
million roubles," he said.

Cherry Bim had taken down his Derby and had adjusted it at the angle
demanded by the circumstances.

"That's right--but I didn't know they was roubles. I _should_ excite my
mentality over waste paper! No, we got word that it was French money."

"There was another man in it?" said Malinkoff, lighting a
cigarette--there had been no attempt to search them.

"Don't let that match go out!" begged Cherry Bim, and dug a stub from
his waistcoat pocket. "Yes," he puffed, "Isaac Moskava--they killed poor
old Issy. He was a good feller, but too--too--what's the word when a
feller falls to every dame he meets?"

"Impressionable?" suggested Malcolm.

"That's the word," nodded Cherry Bim; "we'd got away with twenty
thousand dollars' worth of real sparklers in Petrograd. They used to
belong to a princess, and we took 'em off the lady friends of Groobal,
the Food Commissioner, and I suggested we should beat it across the
Swedish frontier. But no, he had a girl in Moscow--he was that kind of
guy who could smell patchouli a million miles away."

Malcolm gazed at the man in wonderment.

"Do I understand that you are a--a----" He hesitated to describe his
companion in misfortune, realizing that it was a very delicate position.

"I'm a cavalier of industry," said Cherry Bim, with a flourish.

"Chevalier is the word you want," suggested Malcolm, responding to his
geniality.

"It's all one," said the other cheerfully. "It means crook, I guess?
Don't think," he said seriously, "don't you think that I'm one of those
cheap gun-men you can buy for ten dollars, because I'm not. It was the
love of guns that brought me into trouble. It wasn't trouble that
brought me to the guns. I could use a gun when I was seven," he said.
"My dad--God love him!--lived in Utah, and I was born at Broke Creek and
cut my teeth on a '45. I could shoot the tail-feathers off a fly's
wing," he said. "I could shoot the nose off a mosquito."

It was the deceased Isaac Moskava who had brought him to Russia, he
said. They had been fellow fugitives to Canada, and Isaac, who had
friends in a dozen Soviets, had painted an entrancing picture of the
pickings which were to be had in Petrograd. They worked their way across
Canada and shipped o