Though I had devoured the bar hand-out to the final crumb, I was still half-famished; and hunger is but a poor ally in any battle. What he was saying was truth of the truth, so far as the blunt facts were concerned. Every failure I had made in the six weary months confirmed it. There was little room in the world of the well-behaved for the man who was honest enough--or foolish enough--to confess himself an ex-convict; less still for a man who had been made the object of a persecuting conspiracy. None the less, I had resolution, or obstinacy, enough to say: "I don't believe it." "That's what makes me say you're a fool!" he snapped back. "You've got the name, and you may as well have the game. The world is dead easy, if you take it on its blind side; easy living, easy money. Listen, Weyburn, and I'll show you how you can climb into the bandwagon." I listened because I could not well help it, being the man's wretched beneficiary, in a sense. As he talked I felt the ground of good resolutions slipping from beneath my feet. He was staging the old and time-honored swindle--the gold-brick game--and he needed a confederate. The fish was almost as good as landed, and with a little coaching I could step in and clinch the robbery. Kellow proposed to stake me for the clothes and the needful stage properties; and my knowledge of banking and finance, limited as it was, would do the rest. It was a cinch, he averred, and when it was pulled off we could divide the spoils and vanish. It was hardly a temptation. That word calls up a mental picture of stern virtues assailed on every side and standing like a rock in a storm. But, stripped of their poetic glamor, the virtues--and the vices, for that matter,--are purely human; they can rise no higher or sink no lower than the flesh-and-blood medium through which they find their expression. The six months of hardship and humiliation which had brought me to a pass at which I could eat a saloon luncheon at the expense of a thief were pushing me over the brink. Kellow sat back in his chair, smoking quietly, but I could feel his black eyes boring into my brain. When he judged that the time was fully ripe, he drew a fat roll of bank-notes from his pocket, stripped ten ten-dollar bills from it and tossed them across the table to me. "There's the stake, and here's the lay," said he, tersely. "Your name's Smollett; you've struck it rich, and you're on your way home to New York, we'll say, from your mine in Colorado. You're stopping at the Marlborough, and we'll run across you accidentally--I and the come-on--to-morrow forenoon in the hotel lobby. Get that?" "I hear what you are saying."