“The fresh Hick!” observed Mr. Pickins savagely. “I’d like to hand him a bunch of knuckles.”

Mr. Pickins was not now in character, but was clad in quite ordinary good clothes; his prominent cheek-bones, however, had become two white spots in the midst of an angrily red countenance.

“I don’t know as I blame him so much,” said Phelps. “The trouble is we sized him for about the intelligence of a louse. Anybody who would stand for your Hoop-pole County line of talk wouldn’t need such a careful frame-up to make him lay down his money.”

“There’s something to that,” agreed Short-Card Larry. “I always did say your work was too strong, Pick.”

“There ain’t another man in the crowd can play as good a Rube,” protested Mr. Pickins, touched [Pg 87]deeply upon the matter of his art. “I don’t know how many thousands we’ve cleaned up on that outfit of mine.”

“Ye-e-es, but this Wallingford person called the turn,” insisted Phelps. “The only times we ever made it stick was on the kind of farmers that work in eleven-story office buildings. You can fool a man with a stuffed dog, but you can’t fool a dog with it; and you couldn’t fool Yap Wallingford with a counterfeit yap.”

“Well,” announced Mr. Pickins, with emphatic finality, “you may have my part of him. I’m willing to let him go right back to Oskaloosa, or Oshkosh, or wherever it is.”

“Not me,” declared Phelps. “I want to get him just on general principles. He’s handed me too much flossy talk. You know the last thing he had the nerve to say? He invited us up to play stud poker with him.”

“Why don’t you?” asked Pickins.

“Ask Larry,” said Phelps with a laugh, whereat Larry merely swore.

Badger Billy, who had been silently listening with his eyes half closed, was possessed of a sudden inventive gift.

[Pg 88]

“Yes, why don’t you?” he repeated. “If I read this village cut-up right, and I think I do, he’ll take a sporting chance. Get him over to the Forty-second Street dump on a proposition to play two-handed stud with Harry there, then pull off a phoney pinch for gambling.”

“No chance,” returned Phelps. “He’d be on to that game; it’s a dead one, too.”

“Not if you work it this way,” insisted Billy, in whom the creative spirit was still strong. “Tell him that we’re all sore at Harry, here; that Harry threw the gang last night and got me put away. I’ll have McDermott take me down and lock me up on suspicion for a couple of hours, so you can bring him down and show me to him. Tell him you’ve found a way to get square. Harry’s supposed to have a grouch about that stud poker taunt and wants to play Wallingford two-handed, five thousand a side. Tell him to go into this game, and that just when they have the money and the cards on the table, you’ll pull off a phoney pinch and have your fake officer take the money and cards for evidence, then you’ll split up with him.”

Billy paused and looked around with a triumphant eye. It was a long, long speech for the Badger, and [Pg 89]a vivid bit of creative work of which he felt justly proud.

“Fine!” observed Larry in deep sarcasm. “Then I suppose we give him the blackjack and take it all away from him?”

“No, you mutt,” returned Billy, having waited for this objection so as to bring out the clever part of his scheme as a climax. “Just as we have Dan pull off the pinch, in jumps Sprig Foles and pinches Dan for impersonating an officer. Then Sprig cops the money and the cards for evidence, while we all make a get-away.”

A long and thoughtful silence followed the exposition of this great scheme of Billy’s. It was Phelps who spoke first.

“There’s one thing about it,” he admitted: “it’s a new one.”

“Grandest little double cross that was ever pulled over,” announced Billy in the pride of authorship.

It was a matter of satisfaction, to say nothing of surprise, to Short-Card Larry to note the readiness, even the alacrity, with which young Wallingford fell into the trap. Would he accept the traitorous Mr. Phelps’ challenge if guaranteed that he would win? He would! There was nothing young Wallingford [Pg 90]detested so much as a traitor. Moreover, he had a grouch at Mr. Phelps himself.

Short-Card Larry had expected to argue more than this, and, having argument still lying heavily upon his lungs, must rid himself of it. It must be distinctly understood that the crowd wanted nothing whatever out of this. They merely wished to see the foresworn Mr. Phelps lose all his money, so that he could not hire a lawyer to defend him, and when he was thus resourceless they intended to have him arrested on an old charge and “sent over.” They were very severe and heartless about Mr. Phelps, but they did not want his money. They would not touch it! Wallingford could have it all with the exception of the two hundred and fifty dollars he would have to pay to the experienced plain-clothes-man impersonator whom Larry, having a wide acquaintance, would secure.

Mr. Wallingford understood perfectly. He appreciated thoroughly the motives that actuated Mr. Larry Teller and his friends, and those motives did them credit. He counted himself, moreover, highly fortunate in being on hand to take advantage of the situation. Still moreover, after the trick was turned he would stand a fine dinner for the entire [Pg 91]crowd, including Mr. Pickins, to whom Mr. Teller would kindly convey his, Mr. Wallingford’s, respects.

Accepting this commission with some inward resentment but outward pleasure, Mr. Teller suggested that the game be played off that very afternoon. Mr. Wallingford was very sorry. That afternoon and evening he had business of grave importance. To-morrow evening, however, say at about nine o’clock, he would be on hand with the five thousand, in bills of convenient denomination. Mr. Teller might call for him at the hotel and escort him to the room, although, from having had the location previously pointed out to him, Mr. Wallingford was quite sure he could find Mr. Teller’s apartment, where the contest was to take place. Left alone, Mr. Wallingford, in the exuberance of his youth, lay back in his big chair and spent five solid minutes in chuckling self-congratulation, to the great mystification of the incoming Mr. Daw, whom J. Rufus would not quite trust with his reason for mirth. Feeling the need of really human companionship at this juncture, young Wallingford called up his convivial friend from Georgia and they went out to spend another busy and pleasant afternoon and evening, [Pg 92]amid a rapidly widening circle of friends whom these two enterprising and jovial gentlemen had already managed to attach to them. With an eye to business, however, Wallingford carefully timed their wanderings so that he should return, alone, on foot, to his own hotel a trifle after midnight.

As Mr. Teller and Mr. Wallingford, on the following evening at a few minutes before nine, turned into the house on Forty-second Street, they observed a sturdy figure helping a very much inebriated man up the stone steps just before them, but as the sturdy figure inserted a latch-key in the door and opened it with one hand while supporting his companion with the other arm, the incident was not one to excite comment. Just inside the door the inebriated man tried to raise a disturbance, which was promptly squelched by the sturdy gentleman, who held his charge firmly in a bearlike grip while Mr. Teller and Mr. Wallingford passed around them at the foot of the stairs, casting smiling glances down at the face of the perpetually-worried landlady, who had come to the parlor door to wonder what she ought to do about it.

In the second floor back room Mr. Phelps and Mr. Badger already awaited them. Mr. Badger’s greeting [Pg 93]to Larry was the ordinary greeting of one man who had seen the other within the hour; his greeting to Mr. Wallingford was most cordial and accompanied by the merest shade of a wink. Mr. Phelps, on the other hand, was most grim. While not denying the semblance of courtesy one gentleman should bestow upon another, he nevertheless gave Mr. Wallingford distinctly to understand by his bearing that he was out for Mr. Wallingford’s financial blood, and after th............