hat's
the easy thing to do. To-morrow morning ye'll make out that ye can't
abide no longer staying in this dull hole, and offer the skipper of one
of them sealing-boats fifty dollars to have the boat across the ice and
take you to Souris. Then ye will go up and talk plain common-sinse to
madame, and tell her to put on her man's top-coat she's worn before, and
skip out of this dirty fellow's clutches. There ain't nothing like being
scared out of their wits for making women reasonable--it's about the
only time they have their sinses, so far as I know."

"If she won't come, what then?" Caius demanded hastily.

"My woife says that if ye're not more of a fool than we take ye for,
she'll go."

There was something in the mechanical repetition of what his wife had
said that made Caius suspect.

"You don't think she'll go?"

O'Shea did not answer.

"That is what you'll do, any way," he said; "and ye'll do it the best
way ye know how."

He sat upon the bed some time longer, wrapped in grim reserve. The
candle guttered, flared, burned itself out. The two men were together in
the dark. Caius believed that if the first expedient failed, and he felt
it could not but fail, murder was their only resource against what
seemed to them intolerable evil.

O'Shea got up.

"Perhaps ye think the gintleman that is coming has redeeming features
about him?" A fine edge of sarcasm was in his tone. "Well, he hain't.
Before we lost sight of him, I got word concarning him from one part of
the world and another. If I haven't got the law of him, it's because
he's too much of a sneak. He wasn't anything but a handsome sort of
beast to begin with; and, what with drinking and the life he's led, he's
grown into a sort of thing that had better go on all fours like
Nebuchadnezzar than come nigh decent people on his hind-legs. Why has he
let her alone all these years?" The speech was grimly dramatic. "Why,
just because, first place, I believe another woman had the upper hand of
him; second place, when he married madame it was the land and money her
father had to leave her that made him make that bargain. He hadn't that
in him that would make him care for a white slip of a girl as she was
then, and, any way, he knew that the girl and the money would keep till
he was sick of roving. It's as nasty a trick as could be that he's
served her, playing dead dog all these years, and coming to catch her
unawares. I tell ye the main thing he has on his mind i