"Maybe he didn't do you so good a turn as you think," he cried, his voice husky with rage. "But you'll pay him all right. You'll pay me, too, for this night's work. It was like you—a highway robber."
Angus looked from one to the other. There was some meaning in Leyburn's words he could not quite follow.
But the millionaire seemed undisturbed by them.
"Yes," Hendrie said, reaching round to the cabinet behind him and taking a cigar.
He bit the end off, and Angus noted the vicious clip of his sharp, white teeth. He lit the cigar deliberately, and eyed his prisoner through the smoke.
"Yes," he said again, "later I'll be ready to pay most anything. Just now it's you who're going to pay. Guess you ought to understand that. You've known me with my back to the wall before. I'm dangerous with my back to the wall. You likely know that. You paid before—guess you're going to pay now."
Leyburn stirred. The cold ease of this man's manner troubled him. This reference to his doings in the past—before another—had an ominous flavor. Policy kept him silent, though he was longing to shout another furious defiance at him.
"I'm generally ready to take my chances 'bout things," Hendrie went on, "but," he added with a contemptuous movement of the hand, "this isn't as big a chance as no doubt you figure it is. It don't amount to a heap taking forcible possession of a low-down labor man who's set the boys on to firing a million-dollar crop. Also incited them to murder a lot of harmless niggers."
Leyburn's eyes grew hot, but he answered in a tone that matched the other's for contempt.
"That wouldn't go in a court of law," he said. "You've got to prove it. You'd find yourself up against a proposition doing it. The strikers fired that crop because they were drunk." He laughed; but his mirth was little better than a snarl.