"My name is Riggs," continued the prisoner, as he bit off the end of his cigar and expelled it through the window. "Got a match?" The keeper drew a handful from his pocket. I lit a cigar for myself and assumed an attitude of attention. "My wife is little Flossie Riggs. Don't know her? Why, she dances at Proctor's, and all over. I was doing well at my trade, and would have been doing better, if it hadn't been for that confounded diamond. It was this way. There was a fellow named Tenney, who posted bills with me about five years back, and he finally got a job down in the City of Mexico with a railroad, and I used to correspond with him. "Among other things, he told me about a great big diamond that the Emperor Maximilian used to wear in the middle of his crown. According to Tenney, it was one of the biggest on record. He said that Maximilian was so stuck on it that he had it taken out and made into a pendant for the Empress Carlotta, and that she used to wear it around at all the court functions, and so on. About the same time he took two other diamonds out of the crown and made them into finger-rings for himself. "After a while the Mexicans got tired of having an empire and put Maximilian out of business. They stood him and two of his generals up in the parade ground at Queretaro and shot 'em. Now when he was stood up to get shot he had those two rings on his fingers, and the funny part of it was that when the people rushed up to see whether he was dead or not, both the rings were gone. Just about that time, while Carlotta was in prison, the diamond with the big pendant disappeared too. It weighed thirty-three carats. I got all this from Tenney. I don't know where he found out about it. But it all happened way back in '67. "Somehow or other I used to think quite a lot about that diamond--partly because I was sorry for Max, who looked to have come out at the small end; and there didn't seem to be any occasion for shooting him anyhow, that I could see. "Well, I went on bill-posting, and got a good job with the Hair Restorer folks and was doing well, as I said, until one day I happened to take up a paper and read that there were two Mexicans out in St. Louis trying to sell an enormous diamond, but that the dealers there were all afraid to buy it. Finally the police got suspicious, and the Mexicans disappeared. Then all of a sudden it came over me that this must be the diamond that Tenney had wrote about, for all that it had been lost for nearly forty years, and I made up my mind that the Mexicans, having failed in St. Louis, would probably come to New York. I knew they had no right to the diamond anyway, first because it belonged to Maximilian's heirs, and second because it hadn't paid no duty; and I said to myself, 'Next time I write to Tenney he will hear something that will make him sit up.' So every morning, when I started out with my paste-pot and roll of posters, I would keep my eye peeled for the two Mexicans.