Earmarked Gold

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A golden decoy turns against its master to right a vicious wrong.

THE predaceous, lined faces of the two men who sat in that sumptuously furnished suite on the nineteenth floor of the Throckmorton Hotel, gazing out over San Francisco Bay, were not happy ones. Rather, their state of mind added to their naturally pernicious expressions.

It is doubtful that, even had they tried, they could have looked happy. Their faces were not built for it. That agency of Providence who designs the contours and lines of the human race must not be without a sense of humor, for in some beings he places a heart of gold and then forces them to wear the mask of an ogre to hide it from the world. On others, to complete the paradox, he bestows the soul of the devil and the face of a madonna.

But he had not been laughing when he made the mold from which those two were cast. Their faces were evil and they were evil. He had given the world a break by stamping them with faces that advertised the black viciousness of which they were a whole. They had faces that one could long remember. That was one of the reasons those two were now hiding within the comparative security of a luxurious San Francisco hotel instead of frequenting the warmer night clubs along New York's Broadway for which they lived.

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