you off
the minute you showed up. Nothing against you personally, but the Black
Pearl didn't spare me, so why should I--oh, you needn't reach for your
gun. Good old Bob, ain't that what the Pearl calls him, has got me
covered."

"So have I for that matter," said Seagreave.

"All right, if it amuses you." Hanson shrugged his shoulders
indifferently and leaned up against a tree which, growing before the
cabin, had escaped the sweep of the avalanche. "Lord! Don't I know what
you two cut-throats stand ready to do to me? And no one any the wiser.
Well, what the hell do I care? But say, Seagreave, since we're all
having this nice little afternoon tea talk together, sociable as a
Sunday school, it might do you good to take some account of the
has-beens. Here's Bob, he had her before I did, but that ain't taking
away the fact that I had her once, by God! I guess everybody understands
that there's more behind those emeralds than the pretty story we've all
heard so often. The Black Pearl certainly ain't cheap."

"Let him alone, Harry." Bob Flick's voice arresting Seagreave in his
swift rush toward Hanson had never been more liquid, more languid. All
through Hanson's speech his face had not shown even a flicker of
expression. "This is mine. It always has been mine, and I've known it
ever since you and me, Mr.----, I never can recall your name, but, then,
yellow dogs ain't entitled to 'em, anyway--met in the desert."

"I guess that's straight. You always had it in for me from the first
night I saw her. Well, you'll only be finishing what she begun. She
broke me; she drove me straight to hell. Maybe it was a mis-spent life I
offered her, but when I met her I had money and success, I wasn't a
soak. I still had the don't-give-a-damn snap in me, and, even if you're
middle-aged, that's youth. But she's like a fever that you can't shake
off. And she don't play fair. But she's the only one. You know that, Bob
Flick, and she didn't have the right--"

"I ain't ever questioned her right, Hanson"--Flick used his name for the
first time--"and I'm standing here to prove it now. For the sake of Miss
Gallito, because she once took notice of you, I'm going to treat you
like you was a gentleman. Here's your gun. Take your twenty paces. And,
remember, this ain't to wound, it's to kill."

Hanson took the pistol and measured off the paces. Then he turned and
looked from one man to another with a smile of triumph on his evil face.
"Broke by the