"Seven thousand pounds!" I murmured. "Forty-eight thousand between us!"

"Yes, and nearly all of it down below, at this end of the tunnel, and the rest where we dropped it when we heard you were trying to bolt. We'd got it all at the other end, ready to pop aboard the schooner that's lying there still, if you turned out to know anything and to have told what you knew to the police. There was always the possibility of that, you see; we simply daren't show our noses at the bank until we knew how much you knew, and what you'd done or were thinking of doing. As it is, we can take 'em the whole twelve thousand ounces, or rather I can, as soon as I like, in broad daylight. I'm a lucky digger. It's all right. Everybody knows I've been out there. They'll have to pay me over the counter; and if you wait in the cab, by the Lord Harry, I'll pay you your seven thousand first! You don't deserve it, Cole, but you shall have it, and between us we'll see the others to blazes!"

He jumped up all excitement, and was at the door next instant.

"Stop!" I cried. "Where are you going?"

"Downstairs to tell them."

"Tell them what?"

"That you're going in with me, and it's all right."

"And do you really think I am?"

He had unlocked the door; after a pause I heard him lock it again. But I did not see his face until he returned to the bedside. And then it frightened me. It was distorted and discolored with rage and chagrin.

"You've been making a fool of me!" he cried fiercely.

"No, I have been considering the matter, Rattray."

"And you won't accept my offer?"

"Of course I won't. I didn't say I'd been considering that."

He stood over me with clenched fists and starting eyes.

"Don't you see that I want to save your life?" he cried. "Don't you see that this is the only way? Do you suppose a murder more or less makes any difference to that lot downstairs? Are you really such a fool as to die rather than hold your tongue?"

"I won't hold it for money, at all events," said I. "But that's what I was coming to."

"Very well!" he interrupted. "You shall only pretend to touch it. All I want is to convince the others that it's against your interest to split. Self-interest is the one motive they understand. Your bare word would be good enough for me."

"Suppose I won't give my bare word?" said I, in a gentle manner which I did not mean to be as irritating as it doubtless was. Yet his proposals and his a.s.sumptions were between them making me irritable in my turn.

"For Heaven's sake don't be such an idiot, Cole!" he burst out in a pa.s.sion. "You know I'm against the others, and you know what they want, yet you do your best to put me on their side! You know what they are, and yet you hesitate! For the love of G.o.d be sensible; at least give me your word that you'll hold your tongue for ever about all you know."

"All right," I said. "I'll give you my word-my sacred promise, Rattray-on one condition."

"What's that?"

"That you let me take Miss Denison away from you, for good and all!"

His face was transformed with fury: honest pa.s.sion faded from it and left it bloodless, deadly, sinister.

"Away from me?" said Rattray, through his teeth.

"From the lot of you."

"I remember! You told me that night. Ha, ha, ha! You were in love with her-you-you!"

"That has nothing to do with it," said I, shaking the bed with my anger and my agitation.

"I should hope not! You, indeed, to look at her!"

"Well," I cried, "she may never love me; but at least she doesn't loathe me as she loathes you-yes, and the sight of you, and your very name!"

So I drew blood for blood; and for an instant I thought he was going to make an end of it by incontinently killing me himself. His fists flew out. Had I been a whole man on my legs, he took care to tell me what he would have done, and to drive it home with a mouthful of the oaths which were conspicuously absent from his ordinary talk.

"You take advantage of your weakness, like any cur," he wound up.

"And you of your strength-like the young bully you are!" I retorted.

"You do your best to make me one," he answered bitterly. "I try to stand by you at all costs. I want to make amends to you, I want to prevent a crime. Yet there you lie and set your face against a compromise; and there you lie and taunt me with the thing that's gall and wormwood to me already. I know I gave you provocation. And I know I'm rightly served. Why do you suppose I went into this accursed thing at all? Not for the gold, my boy, but for the girl! So she won't look at me. And it serves me right. But-I say-do you really think she loathes me, Cole?"

"I don't see how she can think much better of you than of the crime in which you've had a hand," was my reply, made, however, with as much kindness as I could summon. "The word I used was spoken in anger," said I; for his had disappeared; and he looked such a miserable, handsome dog as he stood there hanging his guilty head-in the room, I fancied, where he once had lain as a pretty, innocent child.

"Cole," said he, "I'd give twice my share of the d.a.m.ned stuff never to have put my hand to the plough; but go back I can't; so there's an end of it."

"I don't see it," said I. "You say you didn't go in for the gold? Then give up your share; the others'll jump at it; and Eva won't think the worse of you, at any rate."

"But what's to become of her if I drop out?

"You and I will take her to her friends, or wherever she wants to go."

"No, no!" he cried. "I never yet deserted my pals, and I'm not going to begin."

"I don't believe you ever before had such pals to desert," was my reply to that. "Quite apart from my own share in the matter, it makes me positively sick to see a fellow like you mixed up with such a crew in such a game. Get out of it, man, get out of it while you can! Now's your time. Get out of it, for G.o.d's sake!"

I sat up in my eagerness. I saw him waver. And for one instant a great hope fluttered in my heart. But his teeth met. His face darkened. He shook his head.

"That's the kind of rot that isn't worth talking, and you ought to know it," said he. "When I begin a thing I go through with it, though it lands me in h.e.l.l, as this one will. I can't help that. It's too late to go back. I'm going on and you're going with me, Cole, like a sensible chap!"

I shook my head.

"Only on the one condition."

"You-stick-to-that?" he said, so rapidly that the words ran into one, so fiercely that his decision was as plain to me as my own.

"I do," said I, and could only sigh when he made yet one more effort to persuade me, in a distress not less apparent than his resolution, and not less becoming in him.

"Consider, Cole, consider!"

"I have already done so, Rattray."

"Murder is simply nothing to them!"

"It is nothing to me either."