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Vince Marr did not very long remain a Monday guy. The risks were not very great, everything considered. Suppose detection did come; suppose the cry of “Stop thief!” was raised. Who would quit watching a circus parade to join in a hunt for a marauder already vanished in a maze of outbuildings and alleyways? Still there were risks to be taken, and the rewards on the whole were small and uncertain. Before he reached his nineteenth year young Marr was the manager of a weighing pitch. Apparently he had but one associate in the enterprise; as a matter of fact he had four. In the place where holidaying crowds gathered–on a circus lot, at a street carnival, outside the gates of a county fair–he and his visible partner would set up his weighing device, and then stationing himself near it he would beseech you to let him guess your correct weight. If he guessed within three pounds of it, as recorded by the machine, you owed him a nickel; if he failed to guess within three pounds of it you owed him nothing. “Take a chance, brother!” he would entreat you with friendly jovial banter. “Be a sport–take a chance!” Let us say you accepted his proposition. Swiftly he would flip with his hands along your sides, would slap your flanks, would pinch you gently as though testing your flesh for solidity, then would call out loudly so that all within earshot might hear: “I figure that the gentleman weighs–let me see–exactly one hundred and forty-seven pounds.” Or perhaps he would predict: “This big fellow will pull her down at two hundred and eight pounds, no more and no less.” Then you placed yourself in the swinging seat of the machine with your feet clear of the earth, and his partner duly weighed you. Sometimes Marr guessed your weight; quite as often, though, he failed to come within three pounds of it and you paid him nothing for his pains. It was difficult to figure how so precarious a means of income could be made to yield a proper return unless the scales were dishonest.

The scales were honest enough. The real profits were derived from quite a different source. Three master dips–pickpockets–were waiting for you as you moved off; they attended to your case with neatness and dispatch. Their work was expedited for them by reason that already they knew where you carried your valuables. Once Marr ran his swift and practiced fingers over your body he knew where your watch was, your wallet, your purse for small change, your roll of bills.

A code word in his patter advertised to his confederates exactly whereabouts upon your person the treasure was carried. Really the business gave splendid returns. It was Marr, though, who had seized upon it when it merely was a catchpenny carnival device and made of it a real money earner. Moreover, the pickpockets took the real peril. Even in the infrequent event of the detection of them there was no evidence to justify the suspicion that the proprietors of the weighing machine were accessories to the pocket looting. Vince Marr was like that–always playing safe for himself, always thinking a jump ahead of his crowd and a jump and a half ahead of the police.

He was never the one to get into a rut and stay there. Long before the old-time grafting circuses grew scarce and scarcer, and before the street-fairing concessions progressed out of their primitive beginnings into orderly and recognized organizations, he had quitted both fields for higher and more lucrative ramifications of his craft. Ask any old-time con man who ostensibly has reformed. If he tells you the truth–which is doubtful–he will tell you it was Chappy Marr who really evolved the fake foot-racing game, who patched up the leaks in the wireless wire-tapping game, who standardized at least two popular forms of the send game, who improved marvelously upon three differing versions of the pay-off game.