“I’ll make your fortune and mine. I’ll square Dinwiddie with the people around there, and tell them all what a great man I intend to make of myself. I’ll pay off a year’s interest on the mortgages and other debts, and make out new papers, just to give them confidence in me. When that is done, I’ll be ready for the real work of—succeeding.” “Succeeding at what?” “At making a fortune.” “And you really think that you can do it?” “With such a name, such a lineage, such a reputation for gentility? Of course I can do it.” “It doesn’t strike me that people will be any more eager to lend you money——” “Lend me money? I don’t want them to do that.” “Then how——” “I shall take it. If they accept me, they must take the consequences.” “Do you mean that you will do it in the old way?” “Sure. What other way do I know?” “What if you should get caught at it, Jimmy?” “Caught at it? Ledger Dinwiddie caught at burglary? At thievery? What an absurd idea! Oh, no, I won’t get caught at it. Not at all. And the world will open itself wide, inviting me to take it. I’ll have a winter home for you, in Washington; I’ll get those fools to send me to Congress, and—— You’ll see!” Such was the beginning of the “Great Coup” undertaken by James Duryea, alias Bare-Faced Jimmy, the gentleman crook, alias Howard Drummond, one-time gentleman, graduate of Rugby and Cambridge, ex-officer in the dragoons, and ex- a lot of other things which had come to him by inheritance. But Jimmy had run the gamut of his short, but varied career. Nothing had been too swift for him to overtake it, to distance it, and finally to wear out its usefulness, and finally his own, too. Once, according to Nick Carter’s records, the man had really tried to reform; “had made a stab at it,” as he expressed it; but the old temptations had been too strong for him; the “call of the contest” had proved too alluring. The desire to pit his own wit against the representatives of law and order had overcome the better self that reposed somewhere within the strange complexity of this man, and he had gone again, deliberately, into the life of the underworld. The woman who was seated upon the chair opposite, and to whom his conversation was addressed, had proved herself to be the only person of whom Jimmy had ever stood in the least in awe. The name by which Jimmy addressed her, was one that he had bestowed upon her himself. She had never been known by that name to any other person than this man who had just determined to steal a birthright, although there were half a dozen aliases by which she had been known to the authorities of Paris, Vienna, Berlin, St. Petersburg, and London; and under each one of those half dozen aliases she had earned reputations which filled pages of private but official records of the secret police of five different nations.