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an' what kind of sensation he's due to pull next; papa's model farm an' auntie's brindle cats and the ancestral diamonds; an' how long they been away an' what for they're cahooting back this winter. Sure; it's all in the papes. Only I been putting together a small line of special dope, do y' see? I been a heap interested in that outfit lately. In fact, ever since I located you on this here peg post!"

HE

E permitted himself a moment's admiring contemplation of the depth and wisdom of Mr. Cisco Red, wherein he betrayed the common weakness of his ancient profession.

"I always do aim to have the dope," he admitted modestly. "An' for true I done pretty well myself since you an' me parted stripes, Buck-petering an' damper-getting an' such-on the sure things.

"Why, it's easy as money from the ol' sock; all you need is to cultivate some private an' confidential line-which ain't! I been floor sweep in a big firm an' sold back a week's sweepings for a bank roll. I've caught lock numbers over an open phone -an' cashed on 'em too!

"Why, I picked up the inside info on a swell yachting joy ride once-an' private was right!--an' might 'a' owned the yacht an' everyone on board only for a slip, getting knocked out with a fizz bottle. But I never see the time I can't nose out a soft lead somewhere some simp that tips his hand or offers a mark or gives the show plumb away.

Buck McRae an' there's the inside info. A fine, profitable bit of dope to put away till ripe!"

He expanded with the glow of self-appreciation. "An' ripe she is, m' son!" he concluded. "Just note the layout as all sleuthed up to date: Here's this rich ol' house been opened up again, but not wired yet no protection-an' the sort of tin wall safe y' can blow with a match. Here's this proud ol' fambly headed home, it seems, but still mostly scattered-no menservants or chaffers in sight. Here's this pore ol' millionaire aunt first on the job, cut off in that roost with her maids an' her tabby cats and the world-famous stack of jewelry she's never without! And lastly: here's you, on the peg post! Soft, ain't it? Easy, ain't it? Because here's where me an' my mates waltz in to collect, an' we all make the killing of our lives!"

"No!"

"Hey?" cried Cisco, checked.

The words broke from Mac hoarsely. "I'll put no hand to it!"

"Who's asking you to put a hand?" "I'll touch no crooked stuff!"

"Who's asking you to touch anything? Y' got a head like a clam! Ain't you never been fixed before?"

McElligott could only blink.

"Fixed!" repeated Cisco, with quickening virulence. "Can't y' see it? I'm fixing you-buying you off-letting you out, y' big cheese! All you got to

I'll have them buttons stripped off an' you behind the bars again t'morrow! Pass over that gatt an' badge, an' look alive about it! Hell's delight-I got a strangle hold on one flat-foot, bean-belly, red-neck stiff of a bull cop an' glory be, I gets hunk once for all. Pass 'em over, y' pore tripe-pass 'em over before I go spill the tip to Headquarters where to find the Missouri escaped convict four-six-seven-four with three years of his sentence left to serve!"

I

T might have been minutes or hours later that McElligott, like a man groping out of coma, began to regain some sort of balance in events.

He was aware of the corner, deserted as before; of the arc light, bright and unchanging; of the snow, whose silent finger tips had erased every track and footprint. Almost it seemed as if nothing had happened or ever could happen in that remote spot. But illusion went no further.

He had a curious sense of his life as a line on an unrolled chart, plotted thin and clear: his unhappy boyhood, his early escape into vagrancy, his youthful erring after adventure and wild company, and his one fatal slip. It was true: he had worn the stripes. True again, as this devil out of the past knew and said: he had broken jail.

That he had swung straight thereafter, that he had broken sharp off with the old ways and found a new start and a new identity in the war-time rush (Continued on page 20)

of '98-such facts were

E struck Paris with the enthusiasm and speed of a flying blast, disguised in brown shoes shined to mirrorlike glossiness and ornamented with brogued toes, turned-up trousers showing a generous six inches of broad-clocked silk hose in hopeful lavender, a waist-fitting Norfolk with patch pockets and

yer had turned over to him various engraved certificates and a brown bank book and had said regretfully: "Well, young fellow, you're twenty-one, and the loot is yours. I can't stop you from making a darned fool of yourself. Go to it, and God bless you!"

padded shoulders, a tub-silk shirt in audacious ONE

stripes of magenta and golden yellow, and an olivegreen Homburg hat with a tiny crimson feather in the puggree band.

Beneath all this exuberant finery was a healthy body of twenty-one, well-muscled, sparsely fleshed, supple and strong and as straight as a lance; and the features, shaded by the tilt of the hat with the fantastic crimson feather, were pleasantly ingenuous, although the honey-colored hair was pompadoured to carved perfection and the massaged cheeks were dusted with a suspicion of Rachel face powder. Needless to mention that his finger nails were manicured until the half-moons glistened like flecks of mica.

The whole: Tobias Pilkington Garrett; and nobody, not even with the strongest claim to what in absence of a better word might be termed as comparative sartorial racioanalysis, could ever have guessed that he was a native son of the great American Northwest, born and bred in Spokane, and that he had never left that careless and optimistic capital of the Inland Empire except for short trips as far east as Butte and as far west as Seattle, until about two weeks earlier, when his late father's law

NE thousand dollars a month! Youth, ignorance, leisure, an unimpaired digestion-and Paris in Maytime: the eastern heaven covered with a vivid cloud plumage of pink and orchid, and to the west, beyond the pompous Pasteur monument, the sunset tints of mysterious gold and purple, like the door to some passionate Old World secret!

And the crowd in the streets: little work girls, hatless, in short black taffeta dresses and high-laced shoes; errand runners from the fashionable modistes' and milliners' shops near the Place Vendôme carrying large round boxes stenciled with such worldfamed names as Riboux and Virot and Doucet; comfortable business men, bearded and silk-hatted, sipping their pink and green apéritifs with cold Gallic dignity; artisans in blue blouses and voluminous trousers, aggressively democratic; white-gloved gendarmes; teamsters crowned with enormous dusty hats; a sergeant of cavalry stumbling along in great bulgy boots; a Spahi, burnoosed, turbaned, statuesque; tourists gaping and tourists intelligent-and over all the scent of Paris, a mingling of gasoline and acrid, black tobacco and perfume. . . .

All this for the asking, the taking-and the paying!

Yet, after a week spent in a swagger hotel of the Rue Saint-Honoré at a startling rate, in which not even the toothpicks were included and no discount allowed for bad plumbing and bath towels of insufficient size, something atavistic, hereditary, strongly compelling, rose and screamed in his soul.

For be it remembered that Tobias Pilkington Garrett's grandfather had been a pioneer who had drifted west in the days of the prairie schooner and who had acquired land and money by the timehonored process, of squatting on somebody else's land with a double-barreled rifle convenient to the trigger finger and by selling Germantown wool, diamond dyes, printed calico, and whisky to the guileless red man; while his father had followed the gold lure into the Coeur d'Alenes and, though not striking a bonanza, had clouted together a decent competence, slowly, patiently, constructively, without wasting either time or effort.

The Garretts had never been booted buccaneers nor swaggering Arnauts. They were a sober tribe of real pioneers, satisfied with taking modest chances -and modest returns.

Thus he of the third generation, while possibly a passive fool, was by no means an active fool. He settled, without spoken criticism but with raised eyebrows, his one week's hotel bill which included such hieroglyphic items as:

After which he bought himself a copy of a Paris daily printed in English and looked over the rubric entitled "Board and Lodging-Special Attention Paid to Americans and English."

HE

E found what he wanted in a large pension of the Rue Richer, two doors from the Folies Bergère Theatre, a stone's throw from the Boulevards, and a few blocks from the Conservatory of Music on the one side and the great foreign wholesale agencies on the other, and, immediately, after Mme. Blanchard, who kept the place, had whispered to a chosen few that Tobias P. Garrett had taken two large front rooms-that he was a gentleman of leisure, and that he had made special and liberal financial arrangements with her to be served every morning, in bed, with a gargantuan transatlantic repast, including such specially cooked foreign dishes as oatmeal and toast-he fell into the niche for which fate and pioneer ancestors had destined him. His one thousand dollars a month, translated into francs, was a phenomenal income to the men who lived at the Pension Blanchard: musical students with long hair, slender purses, shining ideals, and ravenous appetites; painstaking German clerks come to learn the French language and French business methods; the usual mysterious Russian who, blond and blue-eyed, gave somehow the impression of belonging to a dark race; a number of Frenchmen employed in the wholesale establishments of the neighborhood who, living in that far Paris equivalent for Flatbush called Passy, took their midday meals at the pension; a Costa Rican, melancholy over the discovery that the generous remittances from home, given the recent revolution and the rate of exchange for Central American shinplaster, was only a beggar's pittance in French coin.

A motley crew.

But the power, rather the fascination, of money is the same the world over, and so Tobias P. Garrett, who, back in Spokane where his fortune measured with the Northwestern yardstick had not been so overwhelming as to command respect by itself, had been classed and dismissed with the gentle lilies of the field and other things that spin not, smelled the pleasant incense of hero worship-though only at mealtimes and for an occasional half hour, after eating, in the red plush and ormolu salon which was the pride of Mme. Blanchard.

For he spent the greatest part of his income and

also of his time in a thorough study of Paris in its more amusing phases, from the Boulevards to the garish heights of Montmartre, from the stately, blackgreen Bois to the little wheezy penny steamers that ply up and down the Seine.

To him Paris was all silk hose and alcohol. Yet there was an incongruous puritanical streak in him which made him side-step the first and go slightly on the second.

He was an onlooker, quite useless, quite harmless.

MONG those who boarded at the pension in the AMO Rue Richer was a young German from Berlin, Otto Richter, who had been sent by his parent to learn the secrets of the French wine trade and who loved Paris with a love surpassing that of womana love decidedly one-sided. For, although he tried his best to speak the language with the proper clipped, metallic twang, to dress in the most approved Parisian style, to handle gracefully that sort of joshing humor called blague by the French, to wield light love words as a Sicilian gentleman wields the point of his rapier, to melt completely into the gay, checkered background of Paris, the odds were against him, and he failed.

Nor could he help it. Let him stroll down the Boulevards, as insouciant and careless as you please, hat tilted over one ear, cane crooked on elbow, gardenia in his buttonhole, and the less polite ingredients of the street population would nudge each other and make audible remarks in flippant slang, with always the same refrain:

"Ah, un Alboche-a specimen of a German!"

For, physically, he was an exaggerated prototype, a cruel caricature, an incredible vignette of Teutonism in its most rampant form: with a bulging mass of pink and white flesh which mocking heredity had deliberately planned and carved as colossal; ears that stood out like the handles of an Etruscan vase; weak, washed-out eyes shaded by great, goggling spectacles; a knobby, large-pored nose that was indelicate, fantastic, ludicrous; a sagging, loose-lipped mouth; a coarse, rumbling basso voice; and a pearshaped head that, by contrast to the rest of him, seemed dwarfish. The whole uncouth, in a way tragic. For it gave the living, breathing lie to his heart, his soul, his inner feelings.

NE evening-it was in June, 1914, not long be

Tobias P. Garrett, whom he chanced to meet in a café of the Boulevard Saint-Michel, where a French orchestra was struggling hard to bring Latin logic and order into a syncopated American ragtime tune. He had been introduced to him at the pension and had admired and envied, not the young Westerner's money, but his jolly laugh, his exuberant mode of dressing, his slangy, graceful ease of manner.

To-night, without stopping to analyze the reason for it, he made him his confidant, in a sudden outburst of heavy, decent sentimentality.

"I love this town," he said, gesturing with his big, hairy paw and upsetting the glass of beer which the waiter had just put in front of him. "I love Paris. I love France and the French-" "More than Germany?"

"Yes!" The reply was genuine. "My love for the French is spontaneous-it is overwhelming. It is deep in me," striking his broad chest with his fist. "But they, the French-"

"Well?"

"They do not love me. They do not even like me. They make fun of me because I look so German!" Tobias P. Garrett was amused as well as embarrassed. He did not know what to say, and so he suggested the only remedy that came to his mind. "Have a drink," he said, "and forget it."

Thus the friendship began, and the two explored the town together, Richter, who knew his Paris, acting as bear leader, and the American, though the other never ceased to protest, paying the various bills.

ICHTER was with him that night, late in June, Palmier, and the manner of making her acquaintance sealed the friendship between the two young

men.

It was in a café chantant of the Latin Quarter, and it started with cruelty.

Of course nobody meant to be cruel. Individuals never do. But they happened to be bunched into a mob, flushed with cheap alcohol and composed of middle-class Frenchmen and Cook's tourists from Pimlico and the Scotland Road Division of Liverpool.

There was a wave of ridicule, which in turn breeds

enmity, and it was directed against the slight girlyoung, pretty in a careless manner with her whorl of crisp, russet hair, her broad, white forehead, her ice-green eyes framed by thick lashes, her narrow, pleasurable hands, and the sweet curve to her upper lip-who danced across the rickety boards of the low stage that filled the farther end of the cabaret.

She felt the surging wave of ridicule, knew that she could not control it, but tried her best, cracking her fingers and wriggling her slim shoulders after the approved manner of those great Boulevard comediennes she had seen and applauded and envied at the Scala, throwing all her heart, all her tinsel talent, all her little sharp, clever personality into the lilting argot of the gutter ballad which she was singing.

But the wave of ridicule and enmity persisted. It grew. It enveloped and choked her. There were tears in her eyes as, bravely, she tried again:

Et pis c'la nous appell' les dos . . .
Ah! nom de Dieu! j'suis pas bégueule!
Mais si yavait pas tant d' sergots
Minc'! que j' leur-z-y cass'rais la gueule

...

A grimy hand threw an orange through the heavy, stale air toward the stage. It struck the girl on the head, burst, spotted her face and her dress with yellow, pulpy splotches.

She dabbed at them with her handkerchief, trembled, pulled herself together with magnificent pluck, and again tried to stem the tide:

Et pis c'la nous appell' . . . drowned immediately in another hooting chorus of laughter, hisses, foul guttural insults. "Animals!" she cried. "Dirty, dirty animals!" And then a rough fist (Continued on page 27)