The Come-On/Chapter 10

HE east-bound flyer roared into Red Cloud, halting just long enough to exchange mail-sacks. Red Cloud was three hundred miles east of Galena City, and one hundred east of Coppercliffe. As she came to a grinding stop Charles Anson Collingwood and Colonel Jefferson Casimir swung aboard a rear coach, disregarding the protests of the porter. They made direct for a stateroom and opened the door without formality. Inside sat Mr. William Lowrey, the sick engineer, deeply engrossed in a game of solitaire. He looked up as they entered. "Well, by thunder! Red Cloud already!" he exclaimed. "Didn't think we were within an hour of it."

"I got your wire," said Collingwood. "Did you land the money, Frank?"

"You bet I did," said Lowrey, otherwise Frank Duprau, mechanic, lithographer, pen-and-ink artist and lock-expert. "I've got it in my kick—all cold cash."

"Spread her out," said Collingwood.

Duprau produced a thick bundle of bills.

"Even twenty thousand, less some expenses," he announced.

Collingwood counted the money with trained ringers; then he divided it into three portions; one of these he shoved in his pocket.

"1 had the right hunch, stopping off at Galena," he said. "Did he give up easy?"

"Hypnotized," replied Duprau. "Where does he come from? Let's go there. There may be more like him at home."

"You got his whole stack, then." said Casimir. As "Big Jim" McDonough he was well but unfavorably known to the police of two continents. His "come-on" operations had extended over thirty years, and the older he grew the smoother he got. He had shed his soft Southern accent as he would have taken off a coat; just as readily as he could have acted to perfection part of a French count, a crusty cavalry officer with a liver acquired in India, or any one of a dozen roles.

"Charlie can smell a sucker in the middle of a lake," said Duprau admiringly. "He made a strong bluff at a best offer of fifteen cents a share. Then I flashed a picture of my wife and kids on him and swore I would let go under twenty. He gave it to me, claiming it was because I was in hard luck. Wouldn't that jar you? And him thinking he was skinning me thirty cents a share. That's your honest guy, every time!"

"Where did you get the picture?" asked McDonough.

"In a photo gallery. Type of American Motherhood. It's great. I suppose we go right through to the good old Atlantic now, Charlie, eh?"

Collingwood, known to his few intimates as Charlie Smith, and to scores of swindled individuals by as many aliases, nodded absently. He was the real head and executive brain of the trio; they worked on his "frame-ups" with absolute confidence.

Duprau. finding his companions disinclined for further conversation, went back to his solitaire which for him was an endless experiment in the theory of chance.

At the end of half an hour he looked at the others. McDonough was smoking, his eyes on the ceiling. Smith was staring absently out of the window into the blackness of the night. Duprau regarded the latter with profound regret.

"Charlie has got a skirt back East, somewhere," he whispered to McDonough. "We've all had 'em." said Big Jim, with tolerant philosophy. But he, too, presently stared out of the window: for, thirty years before, a woman who loved him had been waiting.