lective pause. "May I ask what use you are going to make of your
discovery?"

"I purpose giving you three young men a chance to talk it over seriously
among yourselves before I take any further steps. I suppose I should
have gone direct to Barrett. I know him, and I know there is plenty of
good in him to appeal to. But candidly, Mr. Bertrand, I didn't have the
heart to--well, to let him know that I knew."

A bitter thought swept across me like a hot wind from the desert. Was
there never to be any let-up? Were people always going to take it for
granted that _I_ was the criminal? I have known physical hunger and
hunger intellectual, but they were as nothing compared with the moral
famine that gripped me just then. I would have pawned my soul for a bare
modicum of the commonplace, every-day respectability which is able to
look the world squarely in the face without fear or favor--without asking
any odds of it.

Everton was evidently waiting for his reply, and I gave it to him.

"Criminality is largely relative--like everything else in the world,
don't you think?" I said, letting him feel the raw edge of the bitterness
that was rasping at me. "In coming to me, as you have, you, yourself,
are compounding a felony."

He shrugged his thin shoulders and looked away at the two on the bluff's
edge.

"Properly speaking, Mr. Bertrand, I am only an interested onlooker; and I
am interested chiefly on Barrett's account. What I may feel it my duty
to do if you three remain obdurate will be purely without reference to
your rather sophistical definition of criminality. In any event,
Blackwell is the man you will have to reckon with. As I say, I am
concerned only so far as the outcome may involve Robert Barrett."

"I'll tell the others what you have said," I agreed; and with this the
matter rested.

XIV

Paper Walls

We held our second war council shortly after Phineas Everton and his
daughter had disappeared over the shoulder of the spur on their way
back to the Lawrenceburg. I gave my two partners the gist of the
conversation with the assayer, briefly and without comment. Gifford
oozed profanity; but Barrett laughed and said:

"Every little new thing we run up against merely urges us to let out
one more notch in the speed of the hurry hoist. Everton's suspicion is
an entirely natural one, and for my part, I only hope he and Blackwell
will hang on to it. If they should, there is an even chance that the