“’Tis so; but that makes no difference. You can’t tell what’s in the heart of a man, Davie--and I know Jack Dargin; that side of him that not you, nor any one else knows. He’d fight you; maybe he’d kill you. But he’d respect you the more.” There was a grim humor in the paradox, but David Vallory was not in the mood to appreciate it. “He’ll be gunning for me; and so will Lushing. But I don’t care; I’ll fight the whole outfit, if I have to. I was fool enough to go into that dive to-night unarmed, but that won’t happen again. Lushing had pulled a gun on me; that was one reason why I jumped him. The next time----” “’Tis little you’d know about the shooting, Davie.” “What I don’t know I can learn. Now you are going straight back home from here ... no, not another step with me. Good-night--Glory--and--God bless you!” Once again, if David Vallory could have had a small modicum of the gift of omniscience; could have detached his astral body, let us say, to send it back over the road he had just traversed; there would have been revelations, puzzling, perhaps, but still not without interest to one fighting against the powers of darkness. At the side of the road the detached messenger would have found a woman, crumpled in a forlorn heap on the cold ground, and sobbing as if her heart would break. Still farther back, in the mining-camp itself, the astral David might have looked into a shabbily luxurious upper room where a curious confirmation of Judith Fallon’s prediction touching the contradictory motives which may lie side by side in the human heart was staging itself. After the fight in the card-room and its supposed tragical outcome, the down-stairs game-room had been hastily closed. As on the night of Plegg’s eavesdropping, the upper room held two occupants, and they were the same two whose voices had reached the first assistant through the partly opened gallery window. And, as before, the lop-shouldered man was the bearer of news. “By cripes! I guess I know what I’m talking about?” he snarled. “I’ve just come from there. He’s gone, I tell you; lit out--skipped. The watchman swears he don’t know nothin’ about it--didn’t go near the shed after they took him there.” The master gambler, again with his hands in his pockets, and again tilting gently in the wooden-seated chair, nodded his approval. “I’m glad of it,” he said. “The hell you are! And him tryin’ to butt in on your game and run you out?” “That’s what I said”--curtly. “And you ain’t goin’ to use that dope that you pulled out o’ me at the end of a gun?” “Not in a thousand years, Simmy. Haven’t you been with me long enough to know that I’m no damn’ worm to crawl up a man’s leg and bite him to death? You say the young duck’s alive and has made his get-away. That’s all right. If he comes at me like a two-fisted man, maybe I’ll send him word that he’d better come heeled. But that’s all.” “You won’t take the dope and do him up the way I was tellin’ you?” “Nothing doing.”