own into
the way of wild boasting. You ought to hear him talk about the affair at
Murderer's Bar! It makes a man shiver to stand there in the sunshine and
hear him. And, with the rest of his drivelling braggadocio, to hear him
tell it, hinting broadly it was a boy of seventeen who, carrying nothing
but an axe, did for the poor devil in the cabin."

"And I, for one, believe him! What is more, I am dead certain--call it
a hunch, if you like--that if he had had the use of his legs all these
years, he'd have gone straight as a string where we are trying to get."
He began to pace up and down, frowning. "Brodie has been hanging around
him lately, hasn't he?"

"Yes. Brodie and Steve Jarrold and Andy Parker and the rest of Brodie's
worthless crowd of illicit booze-runners. They hang out in the old
McQuarry shack, cheek by jowl with Honeycutt. I saw them, thick as
flies, while I was there last week. Brodie, it seems, has even been
cooking the old man's meals for him."

"There you are!" burst out King. "What more do you want? Imagine Swen
Brodie turning over his hand for anybody on earth if there isn't
something in it all for Swen Brodie. And I'll go bond he's giving
Honeycutt the best, most nourishing meals that have come his way since
his mother suckled him--Swen Brodie bound on keeping him alive until he
gets what he's after. When he'd kick old Honeycutt in the side and leave
him to die like a dog with a broken back."

"Well," demanded Gaynor, "what's to be done? With all his jabberings,
Honeycutt is sly and furtive and is obsessed with the idea that there is
one thing he won't tell."

"Will you go and see him one more time?"

"What's the good, Mark? If he does know, he gets lockjaw at the first
word. I've tried----"

"There's one thing we haven't tried. Old Honeycutt is as greedy a miser
as ever gloated over a pile of hoardings. We'll get a thousand
dollars--five thousand, if necessary--in hard gold coin, if we have to
rob the mint for it. You'll spread it on the table in his kitchen.
You'll let it chink and you'll let some of it drop and roll. If that
won't buy the knowledge we want----But it will!"

"I've known the time when five thousand wasn't as much money as it is
right now, Mark----"

"I've got it, if I scrape deep. And I'll dig down to the bottom."

"And if we draw a blank?"

But there was a step at the door, the knob was turning. Mark King
turned, utterly unconscious of the quick stiffening of his body