"The best way is to pick up the ball with your second finger and the back part of your thumb as you pretend to lay the shell down over it: this way." He illustrated, and showed several methods of manipulation, with professional sang-froid; and as he made plain the easy swindle by which many had been duped that morning, there arose an angry and threatening murmur.
"You all see," said Harkless, raising his voice a little, "what a simple cheat it is--and old as Pharaoh.

Yet a lot of you stood around and lost your own money, and stared like idiots, and let Hartley Bowlder lose eighty-odd dollars on a shell racket, and not one of you lifted a hand.
How hard did you work for what these two cheap crooks took from you?
Ah!" he cried, "it is because you were greedy that they robbed you so easily.

You know it's true.

It's when you want to get something for nothing that the 'confidence men' steal the money you sweat for and make the farmer a laughing stock.

And _you_, Jim Bardlock, Town Marshal!--you, who confess that you 'went in the game sixty cents' worth, yourself--" His eyes were lit with wrath as he raised his accusing hand and levelled it at the unhappy municipal.
The Town Marshal smiled uneasily and deprecatingly about him, and, meeting only angry glances, hearing only words of condemnation, he passed his hand unsteadily over his fat mustache, shifted from one leg to the other and back again, looked up, looked down, and then, an amiable and pleasure-loving man, beholding nothing but accusation and anger in heaven and earth, and wishing nothing more than to sink into the waters under the earth, but having no way of reaching them, finding his troubles quite unbearable, and unable to meet the manifold eye of man, he sought relief after the unsagacious fashion of a larger bird than he.