“Aha! I think I see your point.”
“Now, I’ll tell the story of my own experience, and you will see exactly what I mean.”
“Well?”
“I hadn’t been out of prison more than four or five weeks when an old pal of mine came to see me. The first thing he did was to ask questions until he found out that I owed the time I had just been doing up the State to you. Then he asked me to meet some of the gang he was training with, at a place down in East Houston Street. I asked him what the lay was, and he told me that I would find out when I got there—and I did.
“In a few words, the lay had three prongs to it. One of them was for the rescue of a man named Paul Rogers, of whom I had never heard at all at the time. He was sure to be convicted of murder in the first degree, and a rescue was planned to take him away from his guard while he was on his way to Sing Sing.
“I saw no objection to that, inasmuch as we were to be well paid for the job. I did not know, and I do not know now, where the money came from to pay us; I only know that there was plenty of it. There wasn’t to be a blow struck—and, in short, the whole plan was so slick and comfortable, and there was such real genius in it that I rather enjoyed the thing, and went into it as much for the fun of it as for the money—although that was a consideration.
“I won’t stop to tell you about the plan now, for you will hear all about it in the morning. It is one of the things that can happen once, easily, and because of the very simplicity of it, can never occur again. I haven’t been told yet whether it succeeded or not, but I am sure it did, it was so slick.
“Well—things went along swimmingly until there came a new deal, all in the same game. I have told you there were three deals. The second one was a play against Nick Carter.
“I want you to understand in the beginning that there wasn’t a man in that outfit who had not suffered at some time or other at your hands. There wasn’t a man there who had not cried out from behind prison walls for vengeance against you. There wasn’t one who did not grasp eagerly at the thought of it—and right here, Mr. Carter, was where I bolted.”
“Do you mean that you defended me there among them?”