"I want to have a little talk with you, colonel."
Boundary looked up sharply.
"That sounds bad," he said. "What do you want to talk about? The weather?"
"Hardly," said Crewe. A little pause, and then: "Colonel, I'm going to quit."
The colonel made no reply. He went on writing his letter, and not until he reached the end of the page and carefully blotted the epistle did he meet Crewe's eyes.
"So you're going to quit, are you?" said Boundary. "Cold feet?"
"Something like that," said Crewe. "Of course, I'm not going to leave you in the lurch."
"Oh, no," said the colonel with elaborate politeness, "nobody's going to leave me in the lurch. You're just going to quit, that's all, and I've got to face the music."
"Why don't you quit too, colonel?"
"Quit what?" asked Boundary. "And how? You might as well ask a tree to quit the earth, to uproot itself and go on living. What happens when I walk out of this office and take a first-class state-room to New York? You think the Boundary Gang collapses, fades away, just dies off, eh? The moment I leave there's a squeal, and that squeal will be loud enough to reach me in whatever part of the world I may be. There are a dozen handy little combinations which will think that I am double-crossing them, and they'll be falling over one another to get in with the first tale."