He shrugged his shoulders. The whole scheme of his changed existence had all been artfully simple--and superbly efficient. He was under no necessity to explain the source of his wealth except in his native city, San Francisco, where he was known--and San Francisco was outside his jurisdiction. With both Larmon and Maldeck making that their headquarters, other supervision of the local “branch” was superfluous; elsewhere, his wealth was inherited--that was all. So, skipping San Francisco, he had come leisurely eastward, gambling for a week or two weeks, as the case might be, in the various cities, following as guidance apparently but the whim of his supposedly roué inclinations, and he had lost a lot of money--which would eventually find its way back to its original source in the pockets of Gilbert Larmon, via the clearing house conducted by Peter Maldeck. It was extremely simple--but, equally, extremely systematic. The habitues of every branch were carefully catalogued. He had only--and casually--to make the acquaintance of one of these in each city, and, in turn, quite inevitably, would follow an introduction to the local “house”; and, once introduced, the entrée, then or on any subsequent visit to that city, was an established fact. John Bruce laughed suddenly, softly, out into the night. It had been a good bargain that he had made with Mephistopheles! Wealth, luxury, everything he desired in life was his. On the trail behind him in the cities he had already visited he had nightly lost or won huge sums of money until he had become known as the millionaire plunger. It was quite true that, in as much as the money, whether lost or won, but passed from his right- to his left-hand pocket--the pockets being represented by one Gilbert Larmon--the gambler craving within him was but ill served, almost in a sense mocked; but that phase of it had sunk into insignificance. The whole idea was a gigantic gamble--a gamble with life. The whole fabric was of texture most precarious. It exhilarated him. Excitement, adventure, yes, even peril, beckoned alluringly and always from around the corner just ahead. He stood against the police; he stood a very excellent chance of being discovered some morning minus his life if the men he was set to watch, and who now fawned upon him and treated him with awe and an unholy admiration, should get an inkling of his real identity and his real purpose in their houses!