“So I tried another way. When some of the Aqueduct races were going through, on a repeater next to my key, up to Reedy’s pool-rooms, I just reached over and held up one side of the repeater. Then, say third horse won, I strolled to the window and took out my handkerchief three times. My confederate ’phoned to our man, and when he’d had time to get his money up I let the result go through. But they discovered the trick, and called me up on the carpet. And all the rest, you know!” He shook his head lugubriously; then he laughed aloud with a shrug of the insouciant shoulder; then he added, regretfully, “I’d have made a clear five hundred, if they’d only given me another day’s chance!” “Well, I guess maybe you can even up, with us!” And the stranger shook his own head, knowingly, and returned the gaze of the younger man, who was peering at him narrowly, unsteady of eye, but still alertly suspicious. Even in that shadowy substratum to which he had been temporarily driven, good grafts, he knew, had to be sought for long and arduously. And he had no love for that ever-furtive underworld and its follies. It was a life that rested on cynicism, and no man could be a cynic and live. That he knew. He nursed no illusions as to the eventual triumph of evil, in the ever-shifting order of things earthly; and he remembered, with a sting of apprehension, the joy with which he had plunged into the thick of that street-corner group of untainted fellow-men. “I think I’d rather get at something decent again,” he grumbled, pushing away his bean-plate, but still waiting, with a teasing sense of anxiety, for the other to explain more fully. “I guess we’d all like to shy around the dirty work,—but a dead sure thing’s good enough now and then.” “But where’s all the money, in this cinch?” demanded Durkin, a little impatiently. “I can’t cackle about that here, but I tell you right now, I’m no piker! Get into a taxi with me, and then I’ll lay everything out to you as we drive up to the house. But here, have a smoke,” he added as he got up and hurried to the door that opened on the side street. Durkin had never dreamed that tobacco—even pure Havana tobacco—could be so suave and mellow and fragrant as that cigar. “Now, you asked me about the money in this deal,” the older man began, when he had slammed the taxi door and they went scurrying toward Fifth Avenue. “Well, it’s right here, see!”—and as he spoke he drew a roll of bills from his capacious trousers-pocket. From an inner coat-pocket that buttoned with a flap he next took out a pig-skin wallet, and flicked the ends of his paper wealth before Durkin’s widening eyes. The latter could see that it was made up of one hundreds, and fifties, and twenties, all neatly arranged according to denomination. He wondered, dazedly, just how many thousands it held. It seemed, of a sudden, to put a new and sobering complexion on things.