ch men, Matt--we'll be regular swells."

"It'll take years to get rid of 'em," was Matt's more practical thought.

"But think how we'll live! Nothin' to do but spend the money an' go on
gettin' rid of 'em."

Matt's eyes were beginning to sparkle, though sombrely, as his
phlegmatic nature woke up.

"I told you I didn't dast think how fat it was," he murmured in a low
voice.

"What a killin'! What a killin'!" was the other's more ecstatic
utterance.

"I almost forgot," Matt said, thrusting his hand into his inside coat
pocket.

A string of large pearls emerged from wrappings of tissue paper and
chamois skin. Jim scarcely glanced at them.

"They're worth money," he said, and returned to the diamonds.

A silence fell on the two men. Jim played with the gems, running them
through his fingers, sorting them into piles, and spreading them out
flat and wide. He was a slender, weazened man, nervous, irritable,
high-strung, and anaemic--a typical child of the gutter, with
unbeautiful twisted features, small eyes, with face and mouth
perpetually and feverishly hungry, brutish in a catlike way, stamped to
the core with degeneracy.

Matt did not finger the diamonds. He sat with chin on hands and elbows
on table, blinking heavily at the blazing array. He was in every way a
contrast to the other. No city had bred him. He was heavy muscled and
hairy, gorilla-like in strength and aspect. For him there was no unseen
world. His eyes were full and wide apart, and there seemed in them a
certain bold brotherliness. They inspired confidence. But a closer
inspection would have shown that his eyes were just a trifle too full,
just a shade too wide apart. He exceeded, spilled over the limits of
normality, and his features told lies about the man beneath.

"The bunch is worth fifty thousan'," Jim remarked suddenly.

"A hundred thousan'," Matt said.

The silence returned and endured a long time, to be broken again by Jim.

"What in blazes was he doin' with 'em all at the house?--that's what I
want to know. I'd a-thought he'd kept 'em in the safe down at the
store."

Matt had just been considering the vision of the throttled man as he had
last looked upon him in the dim light of the electric lantern; but he
did not start at the mention of him.

"There's no tellin'," he answered. "He might a-been getting ready to
chuck his pardner. He might a-pulled out in the mornin' for parts
unknown, if we hadn't happened along. I guess there'