"Oh, is there?" Mr. Meers wanted to know. "I'll bet there ain't a mistake, because I'm the baby that secured the warrant, and I'm going to send you over. Tried to double cross me, didn't you?" he asked pleasantly. "Well, it can't be done. Any grafter that tries to hand me the worst of it is going to find himself sucking at the sour end of a lemon,----quick. So I was to be the mark, eh? Just because there wasn't a paper signed between us to show that I was entitled to half that surplus stock, you was going to sell the bunch of it and make a quick get-away. I was to be the fall guy for that nice little futurity check, too! You remember that little old hundred, don't you? Well, it got you. I was hep to you day before yesterday, but your date didn't run out on that check till to-day, so I waited; and I'm going to send you over the road for as long a stretch as a good lawyer can hand you. Now stay here and rot!" and Joseph O. Meers, highly pleased with himself, walked out. Jail! Mr. J. Rufus Wallingford, to whom tufted carpets and soft leather chairs were not luxuries but necessities, looked around him with the nearest substitute for a "game" grin that he could muster, and the prophetic words of Blackie Daw occurred to him: "Our turn's next!" "It's a fine joke I played on myself," he mused. "Me that a few weeks ago had a million in sight and that two hours ago had a hundred thousand cinched for to-morrow, to lose out like this; _and for a hundred dollars_!" That was the rub! To think that after all these years, during which he had conducted his pleasant and legally safe financial recreations with other people's money upon a scale large enough to live like a gentleman, his first introduction to a jail should be because of a miserable, contemptible hundred dollars! _Why_ had he forgotten that check? _Why_ had he been fool enough to think he could swear a lot of spineless jelly fish to secrecy? _Why_ hadn't he been content with half? It served him right, he admitted, and unless Meers relented, the penitentiary yawned its ugly mouth very close to him. At any rate, he was now a full-fledged member of the largest organization in the world--the Down and Out Club. It was queer that in all this thought there came no trace of regret for what he had done; there came only regret for the consequences, only self-revilement that he had "overlooked a bet." His "conscience" did not reproach him at all, except for failure; for, monstrous as it may seem, to his own mind he had done no wrong! Nor had he meant any wrong! With no sense of moral obligation whatever--and no more to be blamed for that than another man is for being born hunchbacked--he merely looked upon himself as smarter than most men, doing just what they would have done had they been blessed with the ability. Only at last he had been unfortunate! Well, the joke was on him, and he must be a good loser.