At the entrance of Joe Ellison instead of the expected Dick, Barney and Old Jimmie had sprung up from the table in amazement. Joe strode past Maggie, hardly heeding his daughter, and faced the two men.

“I guess you know me, Jimmie Carlisle!” said Joe with a terrifying restraint of tone. “The pal I trusted—the pal I turned everything over to—the pal who double-crossed me in every way!”

“Joe Ellison!” gasped Jimmie, suddenly as ghastly as a dead man. “I—I didn't know you were out.”

“I'm out, all right. But I'll probably go in again for what I'm going to do to you! And you there”—turning on Barney—“you're got up enough like a professional dancer to be the Barney Palmer I've heard of!”

“What business is it of yours who I am?” Barney tried to bluster. “Perhaps you won't mind introducing yourself.”

“I'm the man who's going to settle with you and Old Jimmie Carlisle! Is that introduction enough. If not, then I'm Joe Ellison, the father of this girl here you call Maggie Carlisle and Maggie Cameron, that you two have made into a crook.”

“Your daughter!” exclaimed Barney in stupefaction. “Why, she's Jimmie Carlisle's—”

“He's always passed her off as such; that much I've learned. Speak up, Jimmie Carlisle! Whose daughter is this girl you've turned into a crook?”

“Your daughter, Joe,” stammered Old Jimmie. “But about my making her into a crook—you're—you're all wrong there.”

“So she's not a crook, and you didn't make her one?” demanded Joe with the calm of unexploded dynamite whose fuse is sputtering. “I left you about twelve or fifteen hundred a year to bring her up on—as a decent, respectable girl. That's twenty-five or thirty a week. If she's not a crook, how can she on twenty-five a week have all the swell clothes I've seen her in, and be living in a suite like this that costs from twenty-five to fifty a day? And if she isn't a crook, why is she mixed up with two such crooks as you? And if she isn't a crook, why is she in a game to trim young Dick Sherwood?”

The two men started and wilted at these driving questions. “But—but, Joe,” stammered Old Jimmie, “you've gone out of your head. She's not in any such game. She never even heard of any Dick Sherwood.”

“Cut out your lies, Jimmie Carlisle!” Joe ordered harshly. “We've got something more to do here, the four of us, than to waste any time on lies. And just to prove to you that your lies will be wasted, I'll lay all my cards face up on the table. Since I got out I've been working for the Sherwoods. Larry Brainard was working there before me, and got me my job. I've seen this girl here—my daughter that you've made into a crook—out there twice. Dick Sherwood was supposed to be in love with her. At the end of this afternoon some officers came to the Sherwoods' and arrested Larry Brainard. I was working outside, overheard what was happening, and crept up on the porch. Officer Gavegan, who was in charge, found a painting among Larry Brainard's things. Miss Sherwood said that it was a picture of Miss Maggie Cameron who had been visiting there, and I could see that it was. Officer Gavegan said it was a picture of Maggie Carlisle, daughter of Jimmie Carlisle, and that she was a crook. Larry Brainard, cornered, had to admit that Gavegan was right. I guessed at once who Maggie Carlisle was, since she was just the age my girl would have been and since you never had any children. And that's how, Jimmie Carlisle, standing there outside the window,” concluded the terrible voice of Joe Ellison, “I learned for the first time that the baby I'd trusted with you to be brought up straight, and that I believed was now happy somewhere as a nice, decent girl, you had really brought up as your own daughter and trained to be a crook!”

Old Jimmie shrank back from Joe's blazing eyes; his mouth opened spasmodically, but no words came therefrom. There was stupendous silence in the room. Within the closet, Larry now understood that low, strange sound he had heard on the Sherwoods' porch and which Gavegan and Hunt had investigated. It had been the suppressed cry of Joe Ellison when he had learned the truth—the difference between his dreams and the reality. He could not imagine what that moment had been to Joe: the swift, unbelievable knowledge that had seemed to be tearing his very being apart.

Larry had an impulse to step out to Joe's side. But just as a little earlier he had felt the scene had belonged to Maggie, he now felt that this situation, the greatest in Joe's life, belonged definitely to Joe, was almost sacredly Joe's own property. Also he felt that he was about to learn many things which had puzzled him. Therefore he held himself back, at the same time keeping his hold upon Red Hannigan.

During this moment of silence, while Larry was wondering what was going to happen, his eyes also took in the figure of Maggie, all her powers of action and expression still paralyzed by appalling consternation. He understood, at least to a degree, what she was going through. He knew this much of her plan: that she had intended to cut loose in some way from Barney and Old Jimmie, and that she had intended that her father should continue to cherish the dream that had been his happiness for so long. And now her father had come upon her in the company of Barney and Old Jimmie and in a situation whose every superficial circumstance was such as to make him believe the worst of her!

Joe turned on the smartly dressed Barney. “I'll take you first, you imitation swell, because I'm saving Jimmie Carlisle to the last!” went on Joe's crunching voice. “I'm going to twist your damned neck for what you've helped do to my girl, but if you want to say anything first, say it.”

Barney's response was a swift movement of his right hand toward his left armpit. But Barney Palmer, like almost all his kind, was a very indifferent gunman; and he had no knowledge of the reputation for masterful quickness that had been Joe Ellison's twenty years earlier. Before his compact automatic was fairly out of its holster beneath his armpit, it was in Joe Ellison's hands.

“I sized you up for that kind of rat and was watching you,” continued Joe in his same awful grimness. “I'm not going to shoot you, unless you make me. I'm going to twist that pretty neck of yours. But first, out with anything you've got to say for yourself!”

“I haven't had anything to do with this business,” said Barney, trying to affect a bold manner.

“You lie! I know that in this game against Dick Sherwood, in which you used my girl, you were the real leader!”

“Well—even if I did use your girl, I only used her the way I found her.”

“You lie again! I know how your kind work: cleverly putting crooked ideas into girls' minds, and exciting their imagination, so they'll work with you. Your case is closed.” He turned to his one-time friend. “What have you got to say for yourself, Jimmie Carlisle?”

Old Jimmie believed that his last hour was come. He showed something of the defiant, almost maniacal courage of a coward who realizes he can retreat no farther.

“What I got to say, Joe Ellison,” he snarled in a sudden rage which bared his yellow teeth, “is that I'm even with you at last!”

“Even with me? What for?”

“For the way you double-crossed me in nineteen-one in that Gordon business. You never gave me a dime—said the thing had fallen down—yet I know there was a big haul!”

“I told you the truth. That Gordon thing was a fizzle.”

“There's where you're lying! It was a clean-up! And I knew you'd been cheating me out of my share in other deals!”

“You're absolutely wrong, Jimmie Carlisle. But if you thought that, why didn't you have it out with me at the time?”

“Because I knew you would lie! You were a better talker than I was, and since our outfit always sided with you, I knew I wouldn't have a chance then. But I reasoned that if I kept quiet and kept on being your friend, I'd get my chance to get even if I waited awhile. I waited—and I certainly got my chance!”

“Go on, Jimmie Carlisle!”

And Old Jimmie went on—a startlingly different Old Jimmie, his pent-up evil now loosed into quivering, malignant triumph; went on with the feverish exultation of a twisted, perverted mind that has brooded long over an imagined injustice, that has brooded greedily and long in private over his revenge, and at last has his chance to gloat in the open.

“When you were sent away, Joe Ellison, and turned over your daughter to me with those orders about seeing that she was brought up as a decent girl, I began to see the big chance I'd been waiting for. I asked myself, What is the dearest thing in the world to Joe Ellison? The answer was, this idea he'd got about his girl. I asked myself, What is the biggest way I can get even with Joe Ellison? The answer was, to make Joe Ellison believe all the time he's in stir that his girl is growing up the way he wants her to be and yet to bring her up the exact thing he didn't want her to be. And that's exactly what I did!”

“You—did—such a thing?” breathed Joe Ellison, almost incredulous.

“That's exactly what I did!” Old Jimmie went on, gloatingly. “It was easy. No one knew you had a daughter, so I passed her off as my own baby by a marriage I'd not told any one about. I saw that she always lived among crooks, looked at things the way crooks do, and grew up with no other thought than to be a crook. I never had an idea of using her myself, till she began to look like such a good performer this last year; and then my idea, no matter what Barney Palmer may have planned, was to use her only in a couple of stunts. My main idea always was, when you came out with your grand idea of what your girl had grown up to be, for you suddenly to see your girl, and know her as your girl, and know her to be a crook. That smash to you was the big thing to me—what I'd planned for, and waited for. I didn't expect the blow-off to come like this; I didn't expect to be caught in it when it did happen. But since it has happened, well—There's your daughter, Joe Ellison! Look at her! Look at what I've made her! I guess I'm even all right!”

“My God!” breathed Joe Ellison, staring at the lean face twisting with triumphant malignancy. “I didn't think there could be such a man!”

He slowly turned upon Maggie. This was the first direct recognition he had taken of her s............