"No, I'm not!" said the Irishman quickly. "No, I'm not. Don't you run away with that idea!" For the first time his hard face began to show feeling. He turned away with a quick nervous movement, and stood staring out of the window into the late sunlight.
"I merely said," he went on, "I merely said that I'd stop short of murder. I don't set any foolish value on life—my own or any other. I've had to take life more than once, but it was in fair fight or in self-defence, and I don't regret it. It was your cold-blooded joke about going upstairs and killing this chap in his bed that put me on edge. Naturally, I know you didn't mean it." He swung back towards the other man.
"So don't you worry about me!" said he after a little pause. "Don't you go thinking that I'm lukewarm or that I'm indifferent to danger. I know there's danger from this lad upstairs, and I mean to be on guard against it. He stays here under strict guard until—what we're after is accomplished—until young Arthur comes of age.
"If there's danger," said he, "why we know where it lies and we can guard against it. That kind of danger is not very formidable. The dangerous dangers are the ones that you don't know about—the hidden ones." He came forward a little, and his lean face was as hard and as impassive as ever, and the bright blue eyes shone from it steady and unwinking. Stewart looked up to him with a sort of peevish resentment at the man's confidence and cool poise. It was an odd reversal of their ordinary relations. For the hour the duller villain, the man who was wont to take orders and to refrain from overmuch thought or question, seemed to have become master. Sheer physical exhaustion and the constant maddening pain had had their will of Captain Stewart.
A sudden shiver wrung him so that his dry fingers rattled against the wood of the chair arms.
"All the same," he cried, "I'm afraid. I've been confident enough until now. Now I'm afraid. I wish the fellow had been killed."
"Kill him then!" laughed the Irishman. "I won't give you up to the police." He crossed the room to the door, but halted short of it and turned about again, and he looked back very curiously at the man who sat crouched in his chair by the window. It had occurred to him several times that Stewart was very unlike himself. The man was quite evidently tired and ill, and that might account for some of the nervousness; but this fierce malignity was something a little beyond O'Hara's comprehension. It seemed to him that the elder man had the air of one frightened beyond the point the circumstances warranted.
"Are you going back to town?" he asked, "or do you mean to stay the night?"
"I shall stay the night," Stewart said. "I'm too tired to bear the ride." He glanced up and caught the other's eyes fixed upon him.
"Well," he cried angrily. "What is it? What are you looking at me like that for? What do you want?"