A bitter thought swept across me like a hot wind from the desert. Was there never to be any let-up? Were people always going to take it for granted that I was the criminal? I have known physical hunger and hunger intellectual, but they were as nothing compared with the moral famine that gripped me just then. I would have pawned my soul for a bare modicum of the commonplace, every-day respectability which is able to look the world squarely in the face without fear or favor—without asking any odds of it.
Everton was evidently waiting for his reply, and I gave it to him.
"Criminality is largely relative—like everything else in the world, don't you think?" I said, letting him feel the raw edge of the bitterness that was rasping at me. "In coming to me, as you have, you, yourself, are compounding a felony."
He shrugged his thin shoulders and looked away at the two on the bluff's edge.
"Properly speaking, Mr. Bertrand, I am only an interested onlooker; and I am interested chiefly on Barrett's account. What I may feel it my duty to do if you three remain obdurate will be purely without reference to your rather sophistical definition of criminality. In any event, Blackwell is the man you will have to reckon with. As I say, I am concerned only so far as the outcome may involve Robert Barrett."
"I'll tell the others what you have said," I agreed; and with this the matter rested.
XIV
Paper Walls
We held our second war council shortly after Phineas Everton and his daughter had disappeared over the shoulder of the spur on their way back to the Lawrenceburg. I gave my two partners the gist of the conversation with the assayer, briefly and without comment. Gifford oozed profanity; but Barrett laughed and said: