"I do. Aleck Curry holds no power over me that can in any way endanger Mona. If I owe a debt, I am willing to pay it. Neither Mona nor I have anything that we want to sell, and Aleck Curry has nothing that we want to buy."
Carter drew in a deep breath.
"If you look at it in that way——"
"There is no other way."
"But Curry and I are the only two men on earth who can swear that you have done these things. The smallest restitution I can make to you for all the wrong I have done your father is to keep my knowledge secret. Torture could not tear it from me. Now—if we can silence Curry, tie his tongue, break him——"
"None of which we can do," interrupted Peter. "He has hated me since the day we first fought over Mona when we were boys. Only one thing could stop his vengeance. I would have to kill him, and that is inconceivable. For my father I would have done that. I had even prepared myself to kill you, Carter, if such an act became necessary to save him. But for myself—no!"
Carter thrust out his hand, but as it gripped Peter's he turned his face away. "You're a lot like your dad," he said. "I see it more every day. I'm going to bed. Good night!"
Caution and habit had made the ferret spread his blankets in the pit of gloom outside the glow of firelight. He disappeared in the darkness and a moment later Peter heard him as he stretched himself out for the night.
But Carter had no idea of sleeping. For days past a thought had been building itself up slowly in his brain, and tonight he had almost revealed that thought to Peter. He watched him now, and in the firelight the drooped figure and pale, sensitive face of the man he had hunted and whose happiness he had helped to destroy tightened something at his heart until he found it hard to breathe. He had never loved a woman, and had never felt the bond of a great friendship for a man, but for Peter something more than the friendship he had known—a thing that was very close to a man's love for a man—had begun to possess him body and soul. In this one warm emotion of his cold and merciless life Carter felt a deeper thrill than in the hour of his greatest man-hunting triumph, and as he lay in stillness, strengthening that thought which was becoming a larger and more definite thing between Peter and Mona and the tragedy which threatened them, his lips parted in the grim and humorless smile which in all the years of his service had made men fear and avoid him.