"For if Clayton gets into any trouble, out he goes! There's no
money in him then, and he's no good to Fritz Braun, no more to me.
This news ought to fetch me a couple of twenties if well played."

It was ten o'clock when Emil Einstein sprang down the stairway of
the eastern terminus of the Brooklyn Bridge. The lad was blithe at
heart as he turned to the left and, passing through the seething
press of the crowds congested under the electric lights of Sands
and Fulton Streets, carefully reconnoitered a gorgeous saloon on
the corner of Layte and Dale Streets.

Einstein peered in through the two swinging doors of the front,
and then betook himself to the side entrance on Dale Street, where
the "Family Entrance," the private corridor, and one or two halls
admitted him to the restaurant, card rooms and private rooms of the
ground floor of the five-story corner brick building. The youth
recoiled, after a peep through a ground glass door left ajar, at
the glories of the main hall of the famous "Valkyrie" saloon.

"What am I to do?" he mused, as he lit his cigarette in a dark
doorway outside, parrying the coarse advances of two fleeting Cyprians
with a retort which brought the blood to their cheeks, leaping up
under the plastered rouge. "I've been forbidden to call him out of
192; he and my mother are both now fooling the Duchess; I am playing
a double game with Clayton, and, by Hokey, old Wade's watchful men
may drop on to me. I may lose the best job in New York if these
people get all tangled up. What the devil is going on, anyway?"

He crossed the street and gazed up at the glaring red pressed-brick
walls of the Valkyrie corner. All the two score of windows on Dale