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Your plain word of old Cap Kidd and buried treasure sounds good, and that's all. In the shell-game the best operator lets the edge of the shell rest on the pea carelesslike, as though he didn't notice it, and then joggles it down over as if by accident; and, honest, the jay hates to take the money, it looks so easy!

It was pungent, salty. He noted a group of people gathered about some center of attraction whence issued a high-pitched intonation. "Oh, look at the cute little pea! Klondike croquet, the packer's pastime. Who'll risk a dollar to win a dollar? It's a healthy sport. It's good for young and old a cheeild can understand it. Three Eskimo igloos and an educated pill!" "A shell-game!"

Don't agree to anything. Don't let them fool you." Lou was apt to be fooled himself. He had not yet learned to keep away from the shell-game wagons that followed the circus. After supper Lou put on a necktie and went across the fields to court Annie Lee, and Carl and Oscar sat down to a game of checkers, while Alexandra read "The Swiss Family Robinson" aloud to her mother and Emil.

That their favourite was persecuted, was to them a veritable rapture. Promptly they invested the apostle of culture with the glamour of a martyr. The fakirs worked the community as shell-game tricksters work a county fair, departing with bursting pocket-books, passing on the word to the next in line, assured that the place was not worked out, knowing well that there was enough for all.

And the wisp of hay in his hair was so genuine, so fresh and redolent of the meadows, so clamorously rural that even a shell-game man would have put up his peas and folded his table at the sight of it. Haylocks seated himself upon a flight of stone steps and once more exhumed his roll of yellow-backs from the valise. The outer one, a twenty, he shucked off and beckoned to a newsboy.

Pierce Phillips halted in his tracks and stared incredulously, then he smiled. "A shell-game, running wide open on the main street of the town!" This WAS the frontier, the very edge of things. With an odd sense of unreality he felt the world turn back ten years.

Wheeler was standing on the Farmer's Bank corner, towering a head above the throng, chaffing with a little hunchback who was setting up a shell-game. To avoid his father, Claude turned and went in to his brother's store. The two big show windows were full of country children, their mothers standing behind them to watch the parade.

Before they had traveled many miles he had learned what there was to learn, for Pierce answered his questions frankly and told him about the sacrifice his family had made in order to send him North, about the trip itself, about his landing at Dyea, and all the rest. When he came to the account of that shell-game the grizzled stranger smiled.