The man stared. "The others?" he repeated. "What others?"
"You were one," said Colonel Tempest. "Now about the rest. I mean to pay them all off. There were ten in it. Where are the nine?"
Marshall stood stock still, as if he were realizing something unperceived till now. Then he shook his fist.
"That Johnson lied to me. I might have known. He took me in from first to last. I never thought but that I was the—the only one. And all I've spent, and the work I've been put to, when I might just as well have let one of them others risk it. He never acted square. Damn him."
Colonel Tempest looked at him horror-struck. The man's anger was genuine.
"Do you mean to say you don't know?" he said, in a harsh whisper, all that was left of his voice. "Swayne, Johnson said you did. On his death-bed he said so."
"Know," retorted the man, his expressionless face having some meaning in it at last. "Do you suppose if I'd known, I'd have—— But that's been the line he has gone on from the first, you may depend upon it. He's let each one think he was alone at the job to bring it round quicker; a double-tongued, double-dealing devil. Each of them others is working for himself now, single-handed. I wonder they haven't brought it off before. Why that fire! We was both nearly done for that night. I slept just above 'im, and it was precious near. If he had not run up hisself and woke me—that fire——"
Marshall stopped short. His mouth fell ajar. His mind was gradually putting two and two together. There was no horror in his face, only a malignant sense of having been duped.
"By——," he said fiercely. "I see it all."
A cold hand seemed to be laid on Colonel Tempest's heart, to press closer and closer. The sweat burst from his brow. Swayne had been an economizer of truth to the last. He had deliberately lied even on his death-bed, in order to thrust away the distasteful subject to which Colonel Tempest had so pertinaciously nailed him. The two men stood staring at each other. A governess and three little girls, evidently out for a stroll after tea, were coming towards them. The sight of the four advancing figures seemed to shake the two men back in a moment, with a gasp, to their former relations.