“You—you’re not dead, Jenkins, are you?” he stammered awkwardly.
Jenkins stirred a little, opened his eyes, put his hand to his throat, and got up, looking warily at his assailant. “It’s no thanks to you that I’m not,” he responded sullenly.
“I didn’t mean to kill you—but you—you struck me too hard—it drove me wild—and for a minute I didn’t know what I was doing.” Jenkins scowled, rubbed his throat again, and drank a glass of whiskey. Bancroft helped himself likewise, following it with a copious draught of water. As they faced each other again Jenkins edged away suspiciously toward the door; but Bancroft went back at once to the unsettled question.
“It would ruin me, financially and in every other way, to go back on Baxter. You might just as well kill me outright as insist upon that.”
“But I’m going to insist upon it,” was Jenkins’s sullen answer.
Bancroft made a despairing gesture. “But I tell you, Jenkins, the thing’s impossible! It would ruin me just as surely as for you to tell all you know. You’ll have to be satisfied with something else.”
Jenkins leaned against the bed and stared angrily at Bancroft. Physical pain had made him obstinate and determined him to press his point, more to return injury for injury than because he wanted that particular thing.
“I tell you now,” Bancroft went on, “that I’d rather take the last way out than try to go back on Baxter. It wouldn’t be the healthiest thing in the world for you if I should kill myself shut up in this room with you, would it?”
“Well, I’ll waive that for the present,” Jenkins replied unwillingly; “but, mind you, it’s only for the present. We’ll talk about it again, later in the season. For the present I want a good, big sum before you leave this room, and hereafter I’ve got to have a regular monthly payment, a check on the first of every month when I don’t come after the cash myself.”