CHAPTER LXXIV.
ROBINSON did not overrate the fatal power of the fabulous mass of gold, a glimpse of which he had incautiously given to greedy eyes. It drew brutus like a magnet after it. He came all in a flutter to mephistopheles, and told him he had met the two men carrying a lump of solid gold between them so heavy that the sticks bent under it. “The sweat ran down me at the sight of it, but I managed to look another way directly.”
What with the blows and kicks and bruises and defeats he had received, and with the gold mass his lawless eye had rested on, brutus was now in a state of mind terrible to think of.
Lust and hate, terrible twins, stung that dark heart to frenzy. Could he have had his will he would have dispensed with cunning, would have gone out and fired bullets from his gun into the tent, and, if his enemies came out alive, have met them hand to hand to slay or be slain. But the watchful foe had disarmed him, and he was compelled to listen to the more reynard-like ferocity of his accomplice.
“Bill,” said the assassin of Carlo, “keep cool, and you shall have the swag; and yet not lose your revenge neither.”
“—— you, tell me how.”
“Let the bottle alone, then; you are hot enough without that. Come nearer me. What I have got to say is not the sort of thing for me to bawl about. We should not be alive half an hour if it was heard to come from our lips.”
The two heads came close together, and Crawley leaned over the other side of the table and listened with senses keen as a razor.
“Suppose I show you how to make those two run out of their tent like two frightened women, and never once think about their swag?”
“Ah!”