"It was the pinch, and I wasn't big enough—in your sense of the word—to meet it. I saw what would happen. If Tucker Jibbey came here, Stanton would pounce upon him at once; and Jibbey, with a drink or two under his belt, would tell all he knew. I fought it all out while I was waiting for the train. It was Jibbey's effacement, or the end of the world for me, and for Timanyoni High Line."
Dexter Baldwin's daughter was not of those who shriek and faint at the apparition of horror. But the gray eyes were dilating and her breath was coming in little gasps when she said:
"I can't believe it! You are not going to tell me that you met this man as a friend, and then——"
"No; it didn't quite come to a murder in cold blood, though I thought it might. I had Maxwell's runabout, and I got Jibbey into it. He thought I was going to drive him to the hotel. After we got out of town he grew suspicious, and there was a struggle in the auto. I—I had to beat him over the head to make him keep quiet; I thought for the moment that I had killed him, and I knew, then, just how far I had gone on the road I've been travelling ever since a certain night in the middle of last May. The proof was in the way I felt; I wasn't either sorry or horror-stricken; I was merely relieved to think that he wouldn't trouble me, or clutter up the world with his worthless presence any longer."
"But that wasn't your real self!" she expostulated.
"What was it, then?"
"I don't know—I only know that it wasn't you. But tell me: did he die?"
"No."
"What have you done with him?"
"Do you know the old abandoned Wire-Silver mine at Little Butte?"