“Moulton, Whitie Burns, and Marty Dean,” confided Jimmie Dale softly to himself.  “And I don’t know of any worse, except—­the Cap.  And gun fighters, every one of them, too—­nice odds, to say nothing of—­”

“Here’s the Cap now!” announced one of the three.  “Hello, Cap, where’d you raise the mustache?”

Jimmie Dale’s eyes shifted to the trapdoor, and into them crept a contemptuous and sardonic smile—­the man who was coming up now and hoisting himself to the floor was the man who, half an hour before, had threatened young Sammy Matthews with arrest.

The Cap, alias Bert Malone, alias a score of other names, closed the trapdoor after him, pulled off his mustache and gray wig, tucked them in his pocket, and faced his companions brusquely.

“Never mind about the mustache,” he said curtly.  “Get busy, the lot of you.  Stir around and get the works out!”

“What for?” inquired Whitie Burns, a sharp, ferret-faced little man.  “We got enough of the old stuff on hand now, and that bum break Gregor made when he pinched the cracked plate put the finish on that.  Say, Cap—­”

“Close your face, Whitie, and get the works out!” Malone cut in shortly.  “We’ve only got the whole night ahead of us—­but we’ll need it all.  We’re going to run the queer off that cracked plate.”

One of the others, Marty Dean this time, a certain brutal aggressiveness in both features and physique, edged forward.

“Say, what’s the lay?” he demanded.  “A joke?  We printed one fiver off that plate—­and then we knew enough to quit.  With that crack along the corner, you couldn’t pass ’em on a blind man!  And Gregor saying he thought we could patch the plate up enough to get by with gives me a pain—­he’s got jingles in his dome factory!  Run them fivers eh—­say, are you cracked, too?”

“Aw, forget it!” observed Malone caustically.  “Who’s running this gang?” Then, with a malicious grin:  “I got a customer for those fivers—­fifteen thousand dollars for all we can turn out to-night.  See?”

The others stared at him for a moment, incredulity and greed mingling in a curious half-hesitant, half-expectant look on their faces.

Then Whitie Burns spoke, circling his lips with the tip of his tongue: 

“D’ye mean it, Cap—­honest?  What’s the lay?  How’d you work it?”

Malone, unbending with the sensation he had created, grinned again.

“Easy enough,” he said offhandedly.  “It was like falling off a log.  Gregor said, didn’t he, that the only way he had been able to get his claws on that plate was on account of young Matthews going away sick—­eh?  Well, the old Matthews woman, his mother, has got money—­about fifteen thousand.  I guess she ain’t got any more than that, or I’d have raised the ante.  Aw, it was easy.  She threw it at me.  I framed one up on them, that’s all.  I’m Kline, of the secret service—­see?  I don’t suppose they’d ever seen him, though they’d