"Why, hello, Wix, my boy! When did you come to town?" A smile broke over Wallingford's face as he shook hands with the bluecoat. "Hello, Harvey," he returned. "I never would have looked for you in this make-up. It's a funny job for the ex-secretary of the Filmore Coal Company." "Forget it," returned Harvey complacently. "There's three squares a day in this and pickings. Where are you stopping?" Wallingford told him, and then looked at him speculatively. "Come up and see me when you go off watch," he invited. "But don't ask for me under the name of Wix. It's Wallingford now, J. Rufus Wallingford." "No!" said Harvey. "What did you do at home?" "Not a thing," protested Wallingford. "I can go right back to Filmore and play hop-scotch around the county jail if I want to. I just didn't like the name, that's all. But I want to talk with you, Harvey. I think I can throw about a hundred or so in your way." "Not me," returned Harvey with a grin. "That's the price of a murder in this town." "Come up, and I'll coax you," laughed Wallingford. He walked away quite thoughtfully. Harvey Willis, who had left Filmore on account of his fine sense of honor--he had embezzled to pay a poker debt--seemed suddenly to fit an empty and an aching void. CHAPTER VIII A THIRD ARM TO THE OLD-FASHIONED DOUBLE CROSS "The fresh Hick!" observed Mr. Pickins savagely. "I'd like to hand him a bunch of knuckles." Mr. Pickins was not now in character, but was clad in quite ordinary good clothes; his prominent cheek-bones, however, had become two white spots in the midst of an angrily red countenance. "I don't know as I blame him so much," said Phelps. "The trouble is we sized him for about the intelligence of a louse. Anybody who would stand for your Hoop-pole County line of talk wouldn't need such a careful frame-up to make him lay down his money." "There's something to that," agreed Short-Card Larry. "I always did say your work was too strong, Pick." "There ain't another man in the crowd can play as good a Rube," protested Mr. Pickins, touched deeply upon the matter of his art. "I don't know how many thousands we've cleaned up on that outfit of mine." "Ye-e-es, but this Wallingford person called the turn," insisted Phelps. "The only times we ever made it stick was on the kind of farmers that work in eleven-story office buildings. You can fool a man with a stuffed dog, but you can't fool a dog with it; and you couldn't fool Yap Wallingford with a counterfeit yap." "Well," announced Mr. Pickins, with emphatic finality, "you may have my part of him. I'm willing to let him go right back to Oskaloosa, or Oshkosh, or wherever it is." "Not me," declared Phelps. "I want to get him just on general principles. He's handed me too much flossy talk. You know the last thing he had the nerve to say? He invited us up to play stud poker with him." "Why don't you?" asked Pickins. "Ask Larry," said Phelps with a laugh, whereat Larry merely swore.