"You don't even know that," the other answered, his lips curling in a wry smile.
"I'll know as soon as you tell me," Bryce hinted.
It is a difficult matter for a man, who all his life has held a close secret, to divulge it at a moment's notice, in a sudden fit of warm friendliness, to a comparative stranger, and so Abel Cumshaw found it. It is even harder to surrender one's hopes and ambitions in favor of a potential rival, honest and all as that rival may appear to be. For one brief moment Cumshaw paused on the brink of revelation, the while he weighed the matter in his mind. In some strange way Bryce had guessed that he was after the gold, but did he know why and how? Cumshaw rather fancied he didn't. He was so sure of it that he decided that he would gain nothing by divulging the connection between himself and the late Mr. Bradby. So the mouth which was opening to speak shut up again like a steel trap, and the dark eyes turned bleak and cold. He looked Bryce steadily and calmly in the face.
"There is nothing to tell," he said, and turned on his heel.
Black night had descended on the forest many hours before, so many in fact that the camp fire had sunk to a feeble red glow, and the dying embers were already circled by a ring of dead white ash. The breeze was crooning softly through the branches of the trees, singing weird chanties to itself. In between the murmurs of the wind there came another sound, the indistinct sound of a sleepy man mumbling to himself. Bryce half-raised himself on one elbow and listened. Half a dozen feet away from him Cumshaw lay tightly rolled in his blankets. He tossed restlessly and once all but sat up. Bryce dropped quickly but soundlessly back into a prone position. But the alarm had been a false one, and presently he quietly raised himself again. The indistinct mumbling went on as before, and he strained his ears to catch some intelligible word.
"Kill me, would you?" he heard the other say.
His voice sank again, and for a time he mumbled and mouthed his words so that Bryce missed most of what he said. He was just on the point of settling down again when Cumshaw suddenly sat up.
"I'll beat you yet, Bradby!" he cried with startling distinctness. "You're dead now and the gold's mine."
His eyes opened and he stared dazedly around him. Bryce was lying prone and snoring away hoggishly. He was fast asleep; there was not the slightest doubt in the mind of the man who watched him so closely.