Well, old man, I am sending you an easy one.  Crack him hard for me.  He’s the rankest sucker yet.  I was going to work the Scholar’s Gambit on him, but he’ll get his hooks on a whole bunch of money when he gets down town, so I turn him over to you.  ’Fifty thou. to be paid him by Atwood, Strange & Atwood.  You know of them—­Mining Engineers and Experts, 25 Broad.  Let him get the boodle and hand him a sour one.

Name, Steve Thompson, en route to New York.  Section 5, Sleeper Tonawanda, Phoebe Snow.  Brown, smooth-shaved, hand-me-down suit, cowboy hat.  From Butte, Montana.  Has sold his mine, the Copper-bottom (on right of trail northeast of Anaconda).  Former partner, Frank Short, killed by powder explosion at Bozeman, two years ago.  Appendix subjoined with partial list of his friends, details about his mine, his ten years of unsuccessful prospecting, etc.  Am not so explicit as usual, because he is such a big-mouthed damfool he’ll tell you all he knows before you get to Hoboken.  Also I am in some haste.  I am to take him to Niagara with me to give you time to get this and join him at Binghamton, if you are there as planned.  If not, I have wired Jim to meet train at Hoboken and keep in touch with him till you come, scraping acquaintance if necessary.  Then he can disappear and leave you to put the kibosh on him.  Jim is all right, but he lacks your magnetism, and your light, firm touch.  You can beat us all putting up a blue front.

RUBE.

Mr. Mitchell rose to instant action.  In a very few minutes his trunk was packed, his bill paid.  He then hied him in haste to the Carnegie Library, where, till train time, he fairly saturated himself with information concerning Butte and vicinity.

When the train pulled out from Binghamton, Mitchell sat across the aisle from Thompson, deep in his paper.  A visorless black cap adorned his head, beneath which flowed his reverend white hair; rimless eye-glasses imparted to his unimpeachable respectability an eminently aristocratic air.  These glasses he wiped carefully from time to time with a white silk handkerchief, which he laid across his ample knees, resuming his reading, oblivious to all else.

The paper was laid aside and the big man became immersed in a magazine.  The handkerchief slipped from his knees into the aisle.  Thompson politely restored it.

“Thank you, young man, thank you,” said Britt.  Then a puzzled look came over his brow.  Polishing the glasses he took another sharp look.  He leaned across the aisle.

“I beg your pardon,” he said, with stately courtesy.  “But I am sure I have met you somewhere.  No, don’t tell me.  Pardon an old man’s harmless vanity, but it is my weakness to make my memory do its work unaided, when possible.  I have a famous memory generally, and yours is not a face to be easily forgotten.  Let me see—­not in New York, I think—­Philadelphia—­Washington?  No—­you would be from the West, by your hat.  Um-m-Omaha—­Chicago, St. Louis?—­Butte!” he said, with a resounding thwack on his knee.  “Butte!  ’Where every prospect pleases, and only man is vile’!”