The man came to his feet with an excited gesture of anger.
“You know that in this business no man can trust his twin brother, and you ask me to trust you to the extent of laying in your hands everything I’ve worked for—the lives of an army!” His tones rose to a climax of vehemence: “And that’s what you ask!”
“You know you can trust me,” began Saxon, conscious of the feeble nature of his argument. “You didn’t have to tell me. I didn’t ask your confidence. I warned you not to tell me.”
“Maybe I was a damned fool, and maybe you were pretty slick, playing me along with your bait of indifference,” retorted Rodman, hotly. “How am I to know whom you really mean to warn? You insist that I shall harbor a childlike faith in you, yet you won’t trust me enough to quit your damned play-acting. You call on me to believe in you, yet you lie to me, and cling to your smug alias. You won’t confess who you are, though you know I know it. No, Mr. Carter, I must decline.”
Saxon stood white and rigid. Every moment wasted in argument imperiled more deeply the girl and the friends he must save, for whose hazarded lives he was unwittingly responsible. Yet, he could do nothing except with Rodman’s assistance. The only chance lay in convincing him, and that must be done at any cost. This was no time for selecting methods.
“I don’t have to tell a syllable of your plans,” he contended, desperately. “They will go with me without asking the reason. I have only to see them. You have my life in your hands: you can go with me. You can disarm me, and keep me in view every moment of the time. You can kill me at the first false move. You can——”
“Cut out the tommy-rot,” interrupted Rodman, with fierce bluntness. “I can do better than that, and you know it. My word on this ship goes the same as if I were an admiral. I can say to the captain that you assaulted me, and it will be my testimony against yours. I can have you put in irons, and thrown down in the hold, and, by God, I’m going to do it!” The man moved toward the cabin bell, and halted with his finger near the button. “Now, damn you! my platform is Vegas y Libertad, and I’m not the sucker I may have seemed. If this is a trick of yours, you aren’t going to have the chance to turn it.”
“Give me a moment,” pleaded Saxon. He realized with desperation that every word the other spoke was true, that he was helpless unless he could be convincing.
“Listen, Rodman,” he hurried on, ready to surrender everything else if he could carry his own point. “For God’s sake, listen to me! You trusted me in the first place. I could have left the boat at any point, and wired back!” He looked into the face of the other man so steadily and with such hypnotic intensity that his own eyes were the strongest argument of truth he could have put forward.
“You say I have distrusted you, that I have not admitted my identity as Carter. I don’t care a rap for my life. I’m not fighting for that now. I have no designs on you or your designs. Let me put a hypothetical question: Suppose you had come to a point where your past life was nothing more to you than the life of another man—a man you hated as your deadliest enemy; suppose you lived in a world that was as different from the old one as though it had never existed; suppose a woman had guided you into that new world, would you, or would you not, turn your back on the old? Suppose you learned as suddenly as I learned, from you, on deck, that that woman was in danger, would you, or would you not, go to her?”