We leave Sun Valley with old Jode on top of the world and beaming at me affectionate. I have got wise, now, and I talk to him stern. He is upset, but he tells me the story of his life—he gets proud of it as he goes along—with all about how he pulls the handkerchief-switch on Ma Mandelbaum, and the gold brick on the Denver Mint, and all the rest. It is a very adventurous career he describes, and it even has glamour. Then he promises that if I stay on as his technical assistant I can have a private experimental laboratory of my own, and he will leave me in the clear in all dealings. So I settle down to planning what I'm gonna have and how I'm going to use it. I expect to set up my laboratory in Las Lagunas, where we are heading.

Las Lagunas is another swank place, with all the bills-of-fare in French and the prices lookin' like Army-Navy estimates. I send for lab-supply catalogs and start hunting for a place to set up shop. Then Jode—who has been circulating social, wheezing happy and contagious—says apprehensive that I better not plan on a lab here, because we may have to move. I ask why. He says he has met Mr. Vachti, and to top off his career he has got an ambition to put over a fast one on him. After that, he says, he will retire and devote the rest of his life to supervising my education.

I am not keen on having my education supervised, but Jode explains that Mr. Vachti is the one guy who has put it over on everybody, and nobody has ever put anything over on him. He is famous from prohibition days. He even beats the income-tax rap the Feds try to pin on him when they despair of linking him with missing persons they think are in barrels of concrete at the bottom of the Chicago River. Mr. Vachti is completely surrounded by lawyers and personal physicians; he is seventy and keeps his old bodyguards out of sentiment, wears dark spectacles, and has a most unpleasant hobby. He owns a yacht, an island, and several million dollars, but his hobby is getting people to try to swindle him and then sending them to jail. He is very respectable now, says Jode, and a good many artistic swindlers have worked on him, but he does not appreciate their artistry. It is a challenge, says old Jode. It will be something to remember in his declining years, Jode says, if he nicks Mr. Vachti for a roll and gets away with it. If I will postpone my laboratory until he is through with Mr. Vachti, he will buy me a eighteen-foot sailboat that I can have personal, and I can loaf around in it while business goes on.

I make the deal. The price of my laboratory is climbing as I think of more things I would like to have. I figure if Jode gets rich enough, maybe I can nick him for a small-sized cyclotron and have some fun. Meanwhile a sailboat won't be bad.

I get it. I do have fun. I have never heard of Hermes Trismigestus; I have never heard of Paracelsus, or Dr. Dee, or Dr. Faustus, or Nicolas Flamel, or any of those guys. I have never heard of Prof Henry Barr. But I learn to sail my boat pretty good and I am happy planning my laboratory.

But old Jode loses his carefree look; he gets absent-minded and fretful. One day he confides his woes to me. "I am afraid," he wheezes pathetic, "that I am losing my grip, Buck. I know Mr. Vachti well. We are on confidential terms. He thinks I am a retired banker, and he has confided to me all about his hobby, and tells me with grim amusement about the various sucker-baits he has been invited to fall for. And I cannot contrive a scheme to offer him! Every type of enterprise the mind of man can invent has been tried on him! The most refined of financial shenanigans have failed! He is on to everything!"