"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."

"Human life is nothing!"

"No; it must end one day."

"You won't give your word unconditionally?"

"No; you know my condition."

He ignored it with a blazing eye, his hand upon the door.

"You prefer to die, then?" "Infinitely."

"Then die you may, and be damned to you!"

CHAPTER XVII. THIEVES FALL OUT

The door slammed. It was invisibly locked and the key taken out. I
listened for the last of an angry stride. It never even began. But after
a pause the door was unlocked again, and Rattray re-entered.

Without looking at me, he snatched the candle from the table on which it
stood by the bedside, and carried it to a bureau at the opposite side
of the room. There he stood a minute with his back turned, the candle,
I fancy, on the floor. I saw him putting something in either jacket
pocket. Then I heard a dull little snap, as though he had shut some
small morocco case; whatever it was, he tossed it carelessly back into
the bureau; and next minute he was really gone, leaving the candle
burning on the floor.

I lay and heard his steps out of earshot, and they were angry enough
now, nor had he given me a single glance. I listened until there was
no more to be heard, and then in an instant I was off the bed and on
my feet. I reeled a little, and my head gave me great pain, but greater
still was my excitement. I caught up the candle, opened the unlocked
bureau, and then the empty case which I found in the very front.

My heart leapt; there was no mistaking the depressions in the case. It
was a brace of tiny pistols that Rattray had slipped into his jacket
pockets.

Mere toys they must have been in comparison with my dear Deane and
Adams; that mattered nothing. I went no longer in dire terror of my
life; indeed, there was that in Rattray which had left me feeling fairly
safe, in spite of his last words to me, albeit I felt his fears on my
behalf to be genuine enough. His taking these little pistols (of
course, there were but three chamber