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“God, there never was a bigger game! It couldn’t flop — unless we spoiled it for ourselves. And that’s what we’ve done. It was too big for us! There was too much money in it — it went to our heads! At first we played square with the syndicate. We made booze and shipped it out — shipped it in carload lots, in trucks, did everything but pipe it out, and we made money for the syndicate and for ourselves. Then we got the real idea — the big one! We kept on making the hooch; but we got the big idea going for our own profit. The syndicate wasn’t in on that.

“First, we got the insurance racket under way. Elder managed that, with three or four assistants. Between them they became agents of half the insurance companies in the country, and they began to plaster Izzard with policies. Men who had never lived were examined, insured, and then killed — sometimes they were killed on paper, sometimes a real man who died was substituted, and there were times when a man or two was killed to order. It was soft! We had the insurance agents, the doctors, the coroner, the undertaker, and all the city officials. We had the machinery to swing any deal we wanted! You were with Kamp the night he was killed! That was a good one. He was an insurance company sleuth — the companies were getting suspicious. He came here and was foolish enough to trust his reports to the mail. There aren’t many letters from strangers that get through the post office without being read. We read his reports, kept them, and sent phoney ones out in their places. Then we nailed Mr. Kamp, and changed his name on the records to fit a policy in the very company he represented. A rare joke, eh?

“The insurance racket wasn’t confined to men — cars, houses, furniture, everything you can insure was plastered. In the last census — by distributing the people we could count on, one in a house, with a list of five or six names — we got a population on the records of at least five times as many as are really here. That gave us room for plenty of policies, plenty of deaths, plenty of property insurance, plenty of everything. It gave us enough political influence in the county and state to strengthen our hands a hundred per cent, make the game safer.

“You’ll find street after street of houses with nothing in them out of sight of the front windows. They cost money to put up, but we’ve made the money right along, and they’ll show a wonderful profit when the clean-up comes.

“Then, after the insurance stunt was on its feet, we got the promotion game going. There’s a hundred corporations in Izzard that are nothing but addresses on letterheads — but stock certificates and bonds have been sold in them from one end of these United States to the other. And they have brought goods, paid for them, shipped them out to be got rid of — maybe at a loss — and put in larger and larger orders until they’ve built up a credit with the manufacturers that would make you dizzy to total. Easy! Wasn’t Brackett’s bank here to give them all the financial references they needed? There was nothing to it; a careful building-up of credit until they reached the highest possible point. Then, the goods shipped out to be sold through fences, and — bingo! The town is wiped out by fire. The stocks of goods are presumably burned; the expensive buildings that the out-of-town investors were told about are presumably destroyed; the books and records are burned.