tepees in a row--" There was a general laugh as Broad began to
shift the walnut-shells, but Kid Bridges retorted, contemptuously:

"That's the trouble with all you wiseacres. You get a dollar ahead
and you fall for another man's game. I never knew a faro-dealer
that wouldn't shoot craps. No, I haven't met no banker's son and I
ain't likely to in this place. These pilgrims have sewed their
money in their underclothes, and they sleep with their eyes open.
Seems like they'd go blind, but they don't. These ain't Rubes,
Lucky; they're city folks. They've seen three-ringed circuses and
three-shell games, and all that farmer stuff. They've been
'gypped,' and it's an old story to 'em."

"You're dead right," Broad acknowledged. "That's why it's good.
D'you know the best town in America for the shells? Little old New
York. If the cops would let me set up at the corner of Broad and
Wall, I'd own the Stock Exchange in a week. Madison and State is
another good stand; so's Market and Kearney, or Pioneer Square,
down by the totem pole. New York, Chicago, 'Frisco, Seattle,
they're all hick towns. For every city guy that's been stung by a
bee there's a hundred that still thinks honey comes from a fruit.
This rush is just starting, and the bigger it grows the better
we'll do. Say, Kid, if you mush over to Tagish with that load of
timothy on your spine, the police will put you on the wood-pile
for the winter."

While Mr. Lucky Broad and his business associates were thus busied
in discussing the latest decree of the Northwest Mounted Police,
other townsmen of theirs were similarly engaged. Details of this
proclamation--the most arbitrary of any, hitherto--had just