Then, at the very verge of the place for attack, he gathered his men, rehearsed in detail what each man was to do, delivered the blow, secured the spoils, and each man of the party split away from the others and fled in scattering directions, to assemble again at a distant point on a comparatively distant date. There they sat down around a council table, and there they divided the spoils. No matter how many were employed, no matter how vast a proportion of the danger and scheming had been borne by the leader, he took no more than two shares. Then fifty per cent of the prize was set aside. The rest was divided with an exact care among the remaining members of the gang. The people who had supplied the requisite information for the coup were always given their share. From this general talk Allister descended to particulars. He talked of the gang itself. They were quite a fixed quantity. In the last half dozen years there had not been three casualties. For one thing, he chose his men with infinite care; in the second place, he saw to it that they remained in harmony, and to that end he was careful never to be tempted into forming an unwieldy crew, no matter how large the prize. Of the present organization each was an expert. Larry la Roche had been a counterfeiter and was a consummate penman. His forgeries were works of art. "Have you noticed his hands?" Scottie Macdougal was an eminent advance agent, whose smooth tongue was the thing for the very dangerous and extremely important work of trying out new sources of information, noting the dependability of those sources, and understanding just how far and in what line the tools could be used. Joe Clune was a past expert in the blowing of safes; not only did he know everything that was to be known about means of guarding money and how to circumvent them, but he was an artist with the "soup," as Allister called nitroglycerin. Jeff Rankin, without a mental equipment to compare with his companions, was often invaluable on account of his prodigious strength. Under the strain of his muscles, iron bars bent like hot wax. In addition he had more than his share of an ability which all the members of the gang possessed--an infinite cunning in the use of weapons and a star-storming courage and self-confidence. "And where," said Andrew at the end of this long recital, "do I fit in?" "You begin," said Allister, "as the least valuable of my men; before six months you will be worth the whole set of 'em. You'll start as my lieutenant, Lanning. The boys expect it. You've built up a reputation that counts. They admit your superiority without question. Larry la Roche squirms under the weight of it, but he admits it like the rest of' em. In a pinch they would obey you nearly as well as they obey me. It means that, having you to take charge, I can do what I've always wanted to do--I can give the main body the slip and go off for advance-guard and rear-guard duty. I don't dare to do it now.