"How would you describe it, Mr. Lawyer?" said he.
Gottlieb laughed and shifted his cigar.
"Our friend Charlie lives by his brains," he replied. "He is an inventor, a promoter, an artist. He has earned many a small fortune by the simple use of a postage stamp. He can extract gold from seawater or silver from pineapples. Incidentally, he is of a scientific turn of mind and can rattle off the Morse alphabet as deftly as any operator in the business. Occasionally he has, in the interest of finance, tapped a wire."
"Tapped a wire!" Instantly I regarded Billington with a new interest. So at last I had met one of those famous gentry of whom I had so often heard!
"Never again, I fancy!" laughed Charlie. "My friend, you have saved a lot of poor devils a deal of trouble. From this time on none of us will ever need to tap wires. After this we shall only pretend to tap 'em."
"How so?" I inquired, dropping into a near-by chair.
"Why, under the new law," responded Billington—"the law of which, I may say, you are the creator—we shall only have to induce some innocent countryman to believe that he has heard the result of a horse-race being sent over the wire in advance of the pool rooms, and persuade him to turn over his roll for the purpose of betting it on a horse that is presumably already cooling off in the paddock and we can keep his money, for he has parted with it for an illegal or an inimical purpose—to wit, cheating the bookies."
"Not with my sanction!" I retorted, somewhat aghast at the idea of having paved a broad and easy path for the way of criminals.
"Tut, tut, Quib!" said Gottlieb. "You have nothing to do with what use our friend here sees fit to put your law to. I have never yet advised any man how to do an illegal thing. The most I have ever done has been to show some of my clients how to do in a perfectly legal manner that which had heretofore been unlawful."
"Yea, Gottlieb," remarked Billington. "And many things that before were accounted faults have now, thanks to you, become virtues."