"Why not?"
"Why not! Because I'm afraid of you. Because I'd as soon have a cobra for my companion, or a wolf for my bedfellow. I know you. I've seen what you can do, and how you can do it. And if you could do those things when the only pressure upon you was one that you could have cast off by going through the Gazette, what would you not do now when you are as desperate as a famished wolf, and governed by no better law than that which governs a wolf—the law of self-preservation? Am I to trust a tiger because he tells me he is hungry? No, Phil Sheldon; neither will I trust you."
"You will give me some money—enough to keep me alive for a week or two."
"Not one sixpence. I'll establish no precedent; I'll acknowledge no tie between us. You'd better march. I don't want to send for a policeman; but if you won't go quietly, you must do the other thing."
"You mean that?"
"Most emphatically yes."
"I didn't think it was in you to be so hard upon me," faltered the wretch in that faint hoarse voice which had grown fainter and hoarser during this interview.
"Did you think that I would trust you?" cried George. "Trust you! You call me hard because I won't give you a corner to lie in. And if I did, you would creep out of your corner to poison me, or cut my throat. You would crawl into my room in the dead of the night and put a pillow over my face, and kneel upon it till you'd done the trick for me; and then you'd walk off with as much as you could carry, and begin the same kind of work over again with some one else. I tell you, Mr. Phil Sheldon, I will hold no intercourse with you. You've escaped hanging, but there's something that's worse than hanging, to my mind, and that is the state of a man whom nobody will trust. You've come to that; and if you had a spark of gentlemanly feeling, you'd have bought two-pennyworth of rope and hung yourself rather than come cringing to me."
"Suppose I don't cringe," said the outcast, dropping the fawning tone of the mendicant for the threatening ferocity of the social wolf; "you'd better give me a trifle to keep body and soul together for the next few weeks. I'm a desperate man, George! You and I are alone up here. You are pretty sure to have ready money about you. And there's your watch; that's worth something. I didn't come here to go away empty-handed. AND I WON'T!"
He sprang to his feet, and in the next moment the lawyer heard the sharp clicking noise made by the opening of a clasp-knife.