know his name fast enough, but I made up something like him.  I showed them where I had a case against Sammy for pinching the plate that was strong enough to put a hundred innocent men behind the bars.  Of course, he knew well enough he was innocent, but he could see the twenty years I showed him with both eyes.  Say, he mussed all over the place, and went and fainted like a girl.  And then the old woman came across with an offer of fifteen thousand for the plate, and corrupted me.”  Malone’s cunning, vicious face, now that the softening effects of the gray hair and mustache were gone, seemed accentuated diabolically by the grin broadening into a laugh, as he guffawed.

Marty Dean’s hand swung with a bang to Malone’s shoulder.

“Say, Cap—­say, you’re all right!” he exclaimed excitedly.  “You’re the boy!  But what’s the good of running anything off the plate before turning it over to ’em—­the stuff’s no good to us.”

“You got a wooden nut, with sawdust for brains,” said Malone sarcastically.  “If he’d thought the gang of counterfeiters that was supposed to have bought the plate from him had run off only one fiver and then stopped because they say it wouldn’t get by, and weren’t going to run any more, and just destroy the plate like it was supposed to have been destroyed to begin with, and it all end up with no one the wiser, where d’ye think we’d have banked that fifteen thousand!  I told him I had the whole run confiscated, and that the queer went with the plate, so we’ll just make that little run to-night—­that’s why I sent word around to you this morning.”

“By the jumping!” ejaculated Whitie Burns, heavy with admiration.  “You got a head on you, Cap!”

“It’s a good thing for some of you that I have,” returned Malone complacently.  “But don’t stand jawing all night.  Go on, now—­get busy!”

There was no surprise in Jimmie Dale’s face—­he had chosen his position behind a pile of cases that he had been extremely careful, as a man is careful when his life hangs in the balance, to assure himself were empty.  None of the four came near or touched the pile behind which he stood; but, here and there about the room, they pulled this one and that one out from various stacks.  In scarcely more than a moment, the room was completely transformed.  It was no longer a storeroom for surplus stock, for the storage of bulky and empty packing cases!  From the cases the men had picked out, like a touch of magic, appeared a veritable printing plant, an elaborate engraver’s outfit—­a highly efficient foot-power press, rapidly being assembled by Whitie Burns; an electric dryer, inks, a pile of white, silk-threaded bank-note paper, a cutter, and a score of other appurtenances.

“Yes,” said Jimmie Dale very gently to himself.  “Yes, quite so—­but the plate?  Ah!” Malone was taking it out from the middle of a bundle of old newspapers, loosely tied together, that he had lifted from one of the cases.