eve that I hadn't a care for our safe flight! You must
learn to use your eyes, son. There was one of the brotherhood of the
road right there in the office when we left. I gave him instructions
last night. He's a sneak thief of considerable intelligence who gave me
the sign as I was pretending to leave for that call on my old friend. I
smuggled him upstairs to keep watch for me and he proved himself a
fellow of decided merit. He'll be hanging round Cornford today and as
the absurd police will be obliged to make an arrest to save their
reputations he will put himself in their way and encourage the idea by
subtle means that he _might_ have been the malefactor who robbed
Seebrook's trunk and left Leary's bills behind. They will be unable to
make a case against him but he'll probably get thirty days for
loitering. Then he'll walk out and draw a thousand dollars from one of
our little private banks further along the road for so chivalrously
throwing himself into the breach! There are wheels within wheels in our
game, and these fellows who make sacrifice hits are highly useful. They
also serve who only go to jail, as John Milton almost said. Even the
police recognize the sacrificial artists; and encourage them--on the
quiet, of course. It calms public complaint of their inefficiency. I can
find you men who will do a year's time to save the men higher up. This
satisfies the public as to the zeal of its paid protectors and makes it
possible for men of genius like you and me to walk in high places
unmolested. A damnable system, Archie, but we learned it from the greedy
trust magnates. You take the wheel; it just occurs to me that you said
you were a fair driver."

Archie had always imagined that men slip gradually from the straight and
narrow path, but he felt himself plunging down a steep toboggan with all
the delirious joy of a speed maniac.

Of one thing he was confident: if he ever returned to his old orderly,
lawful life, he would be much more tolerant of sinners than he had been
in the old tranquil times. He had always found it easy to be good but
now he was finding it quite as easy to be naughty, very naughty indeed.
His speculations as to just how long he could be imprisoned for his
crimes and misdemeanors to date resolved themselves into a question
with which he interrupted the Governor in a sonorous recitation of
Tennyson's Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington.

"If you shoot a man but don't kill him, and pile o