the Secretary of War. Wait there till I come up. I’ve got the finest thing down here in the way of a fish you ever baited for. It’s a Colorado-maduro, with a gold band around it and free coupons enough to buy a red hall lamp and a statuette of Psyche rubbering in the brook. I’ll be up on the next car.”
Jimmy Dunn was an A. M. of Crookdom. He was an artist in the confidence line. He never saw a bludgeon in his life; and he scorned knockout drops. In fact, he would have set nothing before an intended victim but the purest of drinks, if it had been possible to procure such a thing in New York. It was the ambition of “Spider” Kelley to elevate himself into Jimmy’s class.
These two gentlemen held a conference that night at McCrary’s. Kelley explained.
“He’s as easy as a gum shoe. He’s from the Island of Colombia, where there’s a strike, or a feud, or something going on, and they’ve sent him up here to buy 2,000 Winchesters to arbitrate the thing with. He showed me two drafts for $10,000 each, and one for $5,000 on a bank here. ’S truth, Jimmy, I felt real mad with him because he didn’t have it in thousand-dollar bills, and hand it to me on a silver waiter. Now, we’ve got to wait till he goes to the bank and gets the money for us.”
They talked it over for two hours, and then Dunn
