Page:Arthur Stringer--The House of Intrigue.djvu/39

Rh to. That was why my stall could nearly always work, and the hen-flock would always hang around until I came to, and start me off in a taxi or a limousine to some bloomer address in the outskirts. Bud, in the meantime, would hop the fence for a fade-away.

He specialized on glass or ice, which same means simply diamonds, and he had a pet theory that the only kind of thieving that could ever pay in the long run was diamond stealing. A diamond, he said, was always as good as money. It never depreciated. It could always be pried out of its setting and be split or re-cut and could never be traced. And it served women right, he claimed, to lose their glass, for the parading of such stones was not only a vanity but an incitement to the poor. Bud even acknowledged that when he'd got me properly trained in the business the two of us could start out as the biggest glass lifters in the world. He had mapped out some visionary plan of campaign, to take us right through Europe. We were to go only after the best stones in the land. By that time we'd have a deep heel, which means plenty of ready cash, so that we could feed our fence until the blow-over and unload in the Amsterdam markets like a regular dealer.

One point that Bud was especially careful about