“Give it up!” The red had come into Dave Henderson's face, there was a savage tightening of his lips across his teeth. “I'll never give it up! D'ye think I've rotted here five years only to crawl at the end? By God! No! I'll get it—if they get me doing it!” His hoarse whisper caught and choked suddenly. “But it's hell, Charlie—hell! Hell to go under like that, just because there isn't a soul on God's wide earth I can trust to get it for me while they're watching me!” Millman turned away, and walked to the racks of books at the rear of the room.
Dave Henderson watched the other in a numbed sort of way. It was a curious kind of good-by he was saying to Millman. He wasn't quite sure, for that matter, just what he had said. He was soul sick, and body sick. Millman was taking a long while over the selection of a book—and he hadn't even asked for a book, let alone for any particular one. What did it matter! He didn't want anything to read. Reading wasn't any good to him any more! Barjan and Bookie Skarvan had——
Millman was leaning over the counter again, a book in his hand.
“Would you trust me, Dave?” he asked quietly.
“You!” The blood seemed to quicken, and rush in a mad, swirling tide through Dave Henderson's veins. “Do you mean that, Charlie? Do you mean you'll help me?”
“Yes,” said Millman. “If you want to trust me, I'll get that money for you. I'm going out to-morrow. But talk quickly! The guard's watching us and getting fidgety. Where is it?”
Dave Henderson rubbed his upper lip with the side of his forefinger as though it itched; the remaining fingers, spread out fanlike, screened his mouth.
“In the old pigeon-cote—shed back of Tooler's house where I used to live—you can get into the shed from the lane.”
Millman laid the book on the counter—and pushed it toward Dave Henderson.
“All right,” he said. “They won't be looking for it in New York. You've two months more here. Make it the twenty-fourth of June. That'll give you time enough. I'll be registered at the St. Lucian Hotel—New York—eight o'clock in the evening—June twenty-fourth. I'll hand the money over to you there, and——”