But the challenge left McLagan quite unruffled. His smile was derisive as his answer came on the instant.
“That’s all right, Caspar,” he said. “It can look just as it pleases you to make it look. I don’t care a cent. The only thing is Len’s coming right back. I can hear him. And so can you. The ponies, I guess, are fixed. Well, we’re starting for Beacon right away, or we aren’t. You can please your darn self. The price will be paid or not, as you choose. But you’ve only five seconds to choose in.”
“You swear to get out an’ leave me free?”
The malevolent fury in the man’s final curse was the epitome of all his pent feeling. McLagan was his one object of insane hate. And he was driven to bend before his will. He knew the desperate nature of the thing he was doing. He knew the risk of it all. The evidence he was about to put into his hated enemy’s hand. But he knew, being the man he was, and with shackles on his wrists, that it was his only chance. So he yielded. But his yielding had only come with his recognition that the shackles holding him were the official shackles of the United States Government, and must clearly have been put into the hands of these men for their present purpose.
Julian Caspar was still sitting on his piled blankets. McLagan was still leaning against the doorway with his gun in evidence. Len Stern was propped, as before, where the cotton hung loose from the window framing. The monotonous tones of the prisoner’s voice broke up the stillness of the atmosphere of the place. He had been talking for some time. He was not looking at his captors. His dead eyes were on the log wall in front of him. And his gaze suggested a mind reviewing in sequence a series of pictures which gave him not a moment of mental unease. He was transferring his stock at a price. And only was it the payment of the price for which he was concerned.
“It was too easy,” he was saying, with a sound that was perhaps a mirthless imitation of a laugh. “It’s queer ther’s such darn fools running around loose. That boy, Carver, and Stern, here, surely needed wet-nurses before they set out to handle a bunch of dust the way they thought. Why should I stand around on a lousy commission with the stuff lying safe under my hatches, and with only a bum crew of Chinks, an’ a few poor whites to deal with.” He shook his head. “Not on your life. I’d have stood for equal share. I’d have let that boy live for some other guy to do up later. But he guessed to hand me commission. Me, who was the only thing that could help him handle his stuff right. No. My mind was fixed the moment Stern an’ me signed our charter. There was haf a million of stuff to trade, and I guessed I knew who would do the trading.”