“A frame-up!” ejaculated these two in startled unison.

“How a frame-up?” demanded her father, no bit of the accusing harshness gone out of his voice.

“Our plan against Dick Sherwood was to have him propose to me, then for me to confess that I was really married to a mean sort of man I didn’t love—­the idea being that Dick would be infatuated enough to pay a big sum to a dummy husband, and the three of us would disappear as soon as we got Dick’s money.  Dick offered to go through with the plan as Barney Palmer and Jimmie Carlisle had shaped it up—­go through with it to-night—­and then after money had passed, we’d have a criminal case against them.  By reminding him that Larry Brainard knew just what we were up to, and might spoil everything if we didn’t act at once, I got Barney Palmer worked up to the point where he was going to pose as my husband and take the money.  Dick Sherwood was to come a little later, after he’d first telephoned me, with a big roll of marked money.”

There were stuttered exclamations from Barney and Old Jimmie, which were cut off by the dominant incisiveness of Joe Ellison’s words to his daughter: 

“I think you’re lying to me!  Besides, even if you’re telling the truth, it’s a pretty way you’ve taken to clear things up!  Don’t you see that by letting Dick Sherwood come here and play such a part, you’d be dead sure to involve him and his family in a dirty police story that the papers of the whole country would play up as a sensation?  It’s plain to any one that that’s no way a person who wanted to square things would use Dick Sherwood.  And that’s why I think you’re lying!”

“I had thought of that—­you’re right,” said Maggie.  “And so I wasn’t going to do it.  He was going to telephone me—­just about this time—­ and when he called up I was going to fake his message.  I was going to tell Barney Palmer and Old Jimmie that Dick had just telephoned he wasn’t coming, because one of the two had just sold him a tip for ten thousand dollars that this was a crooked game.  I thought this would have started a quarrel between the two; they are suspicious of each other, anyhow.  Each would have accused the other, and in their quarrel they would have been likely to have let out a lot of truth that would have completely given each other away.”

“Not a bad plan at all,” commented Joe Ellison.  He tried to peer deep into his daughter for a moment, his inflamed face relaxing neither in its harshness nor its doubt of her.  “But since you are the clever crook I actually know you to be from your work on Dick Sherwood, and since Jimmie Carlisle says he has trained you to be a crook, I believe that everything you’ve told me is just something you’ve cleverly invented on the spur of the moment—­just so many lies.”

“But—­but—­”

She broke off before the harsh, accusing doubt of his pale face.  For a fraction of a moment no one spoke.  Then the telephone bell began to ring.