His nonchalance incensed the old man, as he had intended it should.
"I want none of your damned lip," declared Captain Dove, glaring at him, "you precious upstart! You're nothing but a beggar on horseback yourself, for all your grand airs. Me and this other gentleman are both sick-tired of them. You're one too many—"
"I'm one too many for you two, at any rate; and you may both stake your last cent on that," Slyne told him with a composure admirable under the circumstances. "You surely don't imagine, do you, that I'm here on any such unsafe footing as you are! I thought you knew me well enough, Dove, to be sure that I'd leave you no opportunity to go back on your bargain with me."
"To hell with you and your bargains!" cried Captain Dove: and then, restraining his rage, lowered his voice again. "The mistake you've always made with me, Slyne, has been to take me for an old fool—as you've very often called me to my face. You think I'm in my dotage. But—I'm not too old to show you a trick or two yet, if you and I come to grips. And, as for being such a fool as you seem to think me—you wait and see! I've a card or two up my sleeve, Mr. Slyne, that'll maybe euchre your game for you, if you try to bluff too high!"
Slyne sat back and studied the old man's face. Captain Dove had made that same mysterious threat on board the Olive Branch in Genoa, before they had started out on their present adventure. It had disconcerted Slyne then. It disconcerted him still more now.
"Don't you think that you're a little inclined to overrate your importance and—er—capacity, Mr. Slyne?" put in Mr. Jobling acidly during the pause, involuntary on Slyne's part. "All your ideas are no doubt based on the documents we mutually signed in Monte Carlo; and you are probably not aware, as I am—now that I have a clearer insight into your motives—that they amount to neither more nor less than a conspiracy to defraud. You would be well advised, believe me, to put them all in the fire."
Slyne turned on him in an instant. "Now, see here, my friend! I want you to understand, once and for all, that I've got you safe where I want you, and that, if I hear much more from you, you'll find yourself in a very unpleasant fix. You wouldn't look well at all in a striped suit—or I believe it's the broad-arrow pattern they supply in the prisons here. And that's what you'll come to, believe me, unless you walk the line I've laid down for you. You can't embezzle trust funds, you know, and pay the interest with promises to be met as soon as you lay your hands on some of the plunder here, without running a very dangerous risk indeed. Why, even the car you sold me in Genoa was another man's property—and I hold your receipt for the price I paid you for it.
"So shut up," he concluded sharply, and proceeded to deal with Captain Dove as if the lawyer had not been there.
Mr. Jobling's flaccid face had become of the colour of mottled clay. He was respiring stertorously, through his mouth. His eyes had grown blood-shot. His back-bone seemed to have given way. He sat huddled up, silent, staring at Slyne with eyes full of impotent fear.
"You talk to me about bluffing!" Slyne was saying to Captain Dove, who also seemed to have grown suddenly apprehensive of some unforeseen mischance. "You talk to me about bluffing, although I've played a straight game with you from the start and stuck to our bargain even against my own interests. Wait a minute. Listen to me—and then you can talk till you're tired.