valise went with me to the mess tent, and I ate supper with
my feet on it, and with the big revolver lying across my knees. After
supper I lugged my responsibility over to the commissary pay-office,
and by the flickering light of a miner's candle stowed the money in the
ramshackle old safe which was the only security the camp afforded.

Past this I lighted the lamps and busied myself with the account books.
There was little doing in the commissary--it was too near pay-day for
the men to be buying much--and the clerk who had taken over my former
job shut up shop quite early. At nine o'clock I was alone in the
store-room building; and at a little before ten I put out the lights
and lay down on the office cot with a sawed-off Winchester--a part of
the pay-office armament--lying on the mattress beside me.

A foolish thing to do, you say?--when at a word I might have had all
the help I needed in guarding the pay-money? No; it wasn't altogether
foolhardiness; it was partly weakness. For, twist and turn it as I
might, there was always the unforgivable thing at the end: the fact
that by calling in help and betraying Dorgan to others, I, once his
prison-mate, and even now, like him--though in a lesser degree--a
law-breaker, would become a "snitch," an informer, a traitor to my
kind. A wretchedly distorted point of view? Doubtless it was. But
the three years of unmerited punishment and criminal associations must
account for it as they may.

I don't know how long the silent watch was maintained. One by one the
night noises of the camp died down and the stillness of the solitudes
enveloped the commissary. The responsibility I was carrying should
have kept me awake, but it didn't. If the coming of sleep had been
gradual I might have fought it off, but the healthy life of the camp
had given me leave to eat like a workingman and to fall asleep like one
when the day was ended. So after the stillness had fairly laid hold of
me I was gone before I knew it.

When I opened my eyes it was with a startled conviction that I was no
longer alone in the little boxed-in office. In the murky indoor
darkness of a moonless night I could barely distinguish the
surroundings, the shelf-desk, the black bulk of the old safe, the
three-legged stool, and at the end of the room the gray patch which
placed the single window. Then, with a cold sweat starting from every
pore, I saw the humped figure of a man beside the safe. As nearly as I
c