Silas P. Hoggan, the man with the broad brow, had no desire to make further acquaintance with the police. As a cosmopolitan adventurer he had lived for the past six years a life of remarkable experiences in Vienna, Berlin, St. Petersburg, and Rome. He posed as a financier, and had matured many schemes for public companies in all the capitals--companies formed to exploit all sorts of enterprises, all of which, however, had placed money in his pocket. Two years before he had been worth thirty thousand pounds, the proceeds of various crooked businesses. At that moment he had been in San Francisco, when, by an unlucky mischance, a scheme of his had failed, ingenious as it was, and now he found himself living in an expensive hotel in London, with scarcely sufficient to settle his hotel bill. Since the day when he had stolen those notes from the coat pocket of his accomplice, and locked him in the trap so that the police should arrest him, and thus give him time to escape--for Silas P. Hoggan and Ralph Ansell were one and the same person--things had prospered with him, and he had cultivated an air of prosperous refinement, in order to move in the circle of high finance. After his escape across the Seine, he had sought refuge in the house of a friend in the Montmartre, where he had dried the soddened bank-notes and turned them into cash. Then, after a week, he had taken the night _rapide_ to Switzerland, and thence to Germany, where in Berlin he had entered upon financial undertakings in partnership with a "crook" from Chicago. Their first venture was the exploiting of a new motor tyre, out of which they made a huge profit, although the patent was afterwards found to be worthless. Then they moved to Russia, and successively to Austria, to Denmark, and then across to the States. Losses, followed by gains, had compelled him of late to adopt a more certain mode of living, until now he found himself in London, staying at one of its best hotels--for like all his class he always patronised the best hotel and ate the best that money could buy--and earning a precarious living by finding "pigeons to pluck," namely, scraping up acquaintanceship with young men about town and playing with them games of chance. As a card-sharper, Silas P. Hoggan was an expert. Among the fraternity "The American" was known as a clever crook, a man who was a past-master in the art of bluff. Yet his friend's warning had thoroughly alarmed him. The circumstance which had been recalled was certainly an ugly one. He had found his victims there, in a swell bar, as he had often found them. About many of the London hotels and luxuriously appointed restaurants and fashionable meeting places are always to be seen young men of wealth and leisure who are easy prey to the swindler, the blackmailer, or the sharper--the vultures of society.