He stopped short, crossed to the table and stood with his fingertips bracketed upon its surface. Morehouse knew Hogarty--knew him as did few other men, unless, perhaps, it was those who, years before, had faced him in the ring. And at that moment Hogarty's eyes were mere slits in his face as he stood and peered down into the newspaper man's upturned features, his mouth like nothing so much as a livid scar above his chin. There was nothing of mirth in those eyes, nothing of merriment in that tight mouth, and yet as he sat and gazed back up at them, Morehouse's own lips began to twitch. They began to relax. That wide grin spread to the very corners of his eyelids and half hid his delighted comprehension behind a thousand tiny wrinkles. "I wonder," he breathed, "I wonder now, Flash, if you are thinking about the same thing I am? For if you are--well, you're too sober faced. You are that! It's time to indulge in a little hysterics." And he began to chuckle; he sat and shook with muffled spasms of absolute joy as the thing became more and more vivid with each new thought. Even Hogarty's answering smile, coming from reluctant lips, had in it something of sympathetic mirth. "That's just what I am thinking," he said. "Just that! It's what I meant when I said I was going to pay him--with his own coin. When a man plays another man crooked, he expects that other man to come back at him some day; he is looking for him to do that. But there is one thing he doesn't expect--not usually. He isn't looking for him to work the same old game. It is something new he's looking to guard against. "And that is where Dennison is weak--in that spot and one other. He doesn't know even yet that when I fell for his game I fell hard enough to wake me up. He thinks I haven't a suspicion but what it was just an accident that laid Sutton out, two years back--just a lucky punch of The Red's that went across and spoiled our perfect frame-up. And he hasn't a suspicion that I know he was sure The Red was going to clean up Sutton, just as surely as they went to the ring together. "That is where he is weak. When a man is a crook he wants to be a real crook--and a real one is suspicious of everybody, even of himself." He lifted one hand and pounded gently upon the polished surface of the table. "The old days are done--dead--when a man got his reputation, and a chance at the big ones simply by fighting his way up from the bottom. I can give a man a bigger reputation in a week, with five thousand dollars' worth of real advertising, than he'd be able to get in a lifetime the old way. And training?----" He jerked his head over one shoulder toward the dressing-rooms beyond the closed door.