Cold sweat broke out on Rollie's brow faster than He could wipe it off.
"I'll make it twenty-five hundred," the young man said hoarsely.
Spider looked interested. He leaned across the table, his darting, peculiar glance shifting searchingly from first one of Rollie's eyes to the other, his form half crouching, his whole body alert, cruelty depicted on his face and suggesting that his nickname was no accident but a sure bit of underworld characterization.
"Make it three thousand, and I'll lay the money in your hand," said the Spider coldly.
Rollie's case was desperate. He drew a blank note from his pocket, filled it, and signed it; then passed it across the table. But with the Spider's seventeen hundred deep in his trousers pockets, the feeling that he had been grossly taken advantage of seemed to demand of Rollie that his manhood should assert itself.
"Spider, you are a thief!" he proclaimed truculently.
"I guess you must be one yourself, or you wouldn't want seventeen hundred in such a hell of a hurry," was Spider's cool rejoinder, as he practically shoved Rollie out of his back door.
Now this retort of Spider's was quite a shock to Rollie; but there are shocks and shocks. Moreover, when the executors upon their scheduled hour came to Rollo Charles Burbeck, trustee, and found his accounts and cash balancing to a cent, which was exactly as they expected to find them, why this in itself was some compensation for taking the back-talk even of a bookmaker.
But the next day Spider Welsh's roll was the fatter by three thousand dollars, and the trust account was short the same amount.
Thereafter, and despite good resolutions, the size of the defalcation began immediately to grow again, al-
