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 town; an artist like Janvier couldn't cut a plate like that within five hundred miles of Broadway. He'd smear it, if he tried to. Maybe they printed in the east; or made the paper, there; probably did."

He was waiting for the switchboard operator to get a connection with the secret service so he could scream his news at them.

If he had learned what he wanted, I had, too. It was perfectly plain to me, of course, that my partner Cleopatra—Doris Wellington, with maid, from Denver—was this daughter of Janvier, engraver of government notes without the government's coöperation. Her bit in the business was—to employ the convenient phrase of the Flamingo Feather—to blow out the bad dough, to shove "the queer."

You may gather that this realization did not come exactly as a shock to me; in fact, I felt rather a relief. Participation in that affair at the Flamingo Feather might imply so many customs worse than the mere personal issue of money that I drifted back to the Blackstone with cheer. What I'd found about her family certainly might have been a lot worse; yes, a whole lot. She'd stuck with her father, evidently. I liked that.