If Jeffard had forgotten his directions the uproar in Number Eighteen would have guided him. Garvin's voice, uplifted in alternate malediction and maudlin bathos, jarred upon the air of the corridor. Jeffard paused. The long chase was ended and only a pine door intervened between pursuer and pursued. He laid a hand on the doorknob. His breath came hard, and the veins in his forehead were like knotted whipcords. While he paused some broken babblings from within wrought a swift change in him. The knotted veins relaxed and he laughed, not mirthfully but with a cynical upcurve of the lip. His hand slipped from the doorknob, and he stole away, cat-like, to let himself noiselessly into the adjoining room.
There was a door of communication between the two rooms, bolted on Jeffard's side, and with the knob removed. He went on his knees to the square hole through the lock, but the angle of vision included no more than a blank patch of the opposite wall. Then he laid his ear to the aperture. Out of the jangling discord beyond the door came fragmentary lucidities pieceable together into a strand of sequence. Garvin had told all he knew, or all he could remember, and the robbery paused at the trivial detail of the most feasible route over the mountains from Aspen. But to make sure, and possibly to provide against the contingency of having to eliminate Garvin, some rude map was needed; and this one of the plunderers was evidently trying to draw under instructions from the witling. At the mention of a map, Jeffard rummaged his pockets without taking his ear from the door. From one of them he drew a crumpled bit of paper, thumbed and crease-broken. It was Garvin's map of the claim and the trail, passed over for inspection in the hollow of a certain lambent evening months before and never returned.
Who shall say what was behind the inscrutable darkling of the eyes of him when he returned the paper to his pocket and bent to listen with four senses lending their acuteness to the fifth? Was it a softening memory of the loving-kindnesses of one James Garvin to a man soul-sick and body-wasted, snatched as a charred brand out of a fire of his own kindling? Or was it the stirring of a ruthless devil of self; a devil never more than dormant in any heart insurgent; a fell demon of the pit whose arousing waits only upon opportunity, whose power is to transform pity into remorseless ingratitude and ruth into relentless greed? There was room for the alternative.
"Here; take another nip o' this and pull yourself together,"—it was the voice of the hawk-faced one. "If you wasn't such a howlin' idiot you'd see that we're the only friends you've got. I keep a-tellin' you that that slick pardner o' yours was on that wild ingine, and if you don't sink a shaft on your wits he's a-goin' to do you up cold!"
The appeal brought blood as a blow. The crash of an overturned chair was followed by an explosion of cursings, the outcries of a soul in torment. And when the madman choked in the fullness of it, a voice said: "Pick up that chair, Pete, and pull him down. He'll be seein' things in a minute, and that'll settle the whole shootin'-match." There was a struggle short but violent, the jar of a forcible downsetting, and a sound as of one flinging his arms abroad upon the table. After which the tormented one became brokenly articulate. What he said is unrecordable. With maudlin oath and thick-tongued ravings he rehearsed his fancied wrongs and breathed forth promises of vengeance, calling down the wrath of the spheres upon one Henry Jeffard and his posterity to the third and fourth generation.
"That's all right; I'd kill him on sight, if I was you. But just now you're killin' time, instid. First you know, he'll be on his way acrost the range, and then where'll you be? You don't even know that he didn't locate that claim before you came out. Git down to business and tell us where that valley is, if you ever knowed. You said it was on a creek"—
Jeffard rose and went softly across the room to sit on the edge of the bed. The unfathomable light was still in his eyes, and his thought wrought itself into words.
"It's done; they'll wring it out of him, and then fling him aside like so much offal. I wonder if it is worth while to try to save it—for him. What good would it do him?—or, rather, what evil thing is there that it wouldn't make possible for him? What devil of curiosity led me to open this Pandora-box of responsibility? For I am responsible, first for the finding, and now for the keeping, and hereafter for what shall come of it. That is, if I save it—for him." He got upon his feet and tiptoed back to the door of communication, listening once more. The clamor had quieted down, and the scratching of a pen gnawed the silence. Then came the voice of the hawk-faced one.