"I do now. And I know her _metier_ even better than you do, Bertie, dear. She might go to her grave loving you to distraction, but she would never have an ex-convict for the father of her children--not if she knew it. It's in the Everton blood. Anybody who knew Phineas Everton as you and I did in the old school-days, ought to know exactly what to expect of his daughter." I sat up quickly, and the lights in the high-swung drawing-room chandelier began to turn red for me. "You devil! Do you mean to say that you would tell Polly Everton?" I burst out savagely. "I'm not going to tell her because you are not going to drive me to it,"--this with a half-stifled yawn behind a faultless white hand that was just beginning to show the blue veining of bad hours and dissipation. Then: "Go back to your hotel and go to bed, Bertie. You'll wake up in a better frame of mind a few hours later, perhaps. Kiss me, and say good-night." As I have confessed, I carried a gun in those days; had carried one ever since that memorable afternoon when I had dropped from the trolley-car in Cripple Creek to preface the opening of our business office by going first to a hardware shop for the purchase of a weapon. After leaving the Altberg house I dismissed the night-owl cab on the north bank of the river and crossed the Platte on the viaduct afoot. Half-way over I stopped to look down into the winter-dry bed of the stream. There was one way out of the wretched labyrinth of shame and double-dealing into which my weakness and cowardice had led me. The weapon sagged heavily in my pocket as if it were a sentient thing trying in some dumb fashion to make its presence felt. It was but a gripping of the pistol and a quick pull at the trigger, and I should be out of the labyrinth for good and all. I don't know why I didn't do it; why I hadn't done it long before--or rather, I do know. It was because, when the deciding moment came, I was always confronted by a vivid and soul-harrowing flash-light picture of Polly Everton's face as it would look when they should tell her. XIX A Reckoning and a Hold-Up I imagine it is only in fiction that a man is able to live a double life successfully to the grand climax. I failed because the mounting fortunes of the Little Clean-Up, my share of which was as yet merely giving me money to squander on the extravagant whims and caprices of Agatha Geddis, were making all three of us, Gifford, Barrett and myself, marked men. One incident of the marking timed itself in one of my trips to Denver. I had breakfasted at the Brown and was leaving my room-key with the clerk when I ran up against the plain-clothes man who had arrested me on the day of my arrival as a runaway. I should have passed him without recognition, as a matter of course, but he stopped and accosted me.