“Well, then, by cripes! I know somebody that will take it--and pay good money for it!” shrilled the disappointed one. “Grillage, you mean?” “No; I tried him, and what do I get? He tells that big, black nigger porter of his to put me out of the car. I’ll show him--him and Vallory at the same clatter!” The master gambler got up, as if to signify that he had heard enough. “Better look out that you don’t get stepped on--like other worms--Simmy,” he warned; and then, reaching for the hanging lamp over the table to turn it out: “Get a crawl on you; I’m going to shut up shop.” XXI The Other David When David Vallory, plodding doggedly, reached the construction camp upon his return from Powder Can, he found Herbert Oswald waiting for him at the steps of the office bunk car. “Everybody had gone to bed in the hotel, and I thought I’d straggle down to see if I could find your headquarters,” was the way in which the young lawyer accounted for himself. “If you are tired and want to turn in, you are at liberty to shoo me away.” “No,” said David crisply. “Come on in.” Oswald groped his way into the dark interior of the car at the heels of his crusty welcomer and found a seat on Plegg’s unoccupied bunk while David was lighting a lamp. At the blowing-out of the match, the lamp-lighter stood staring gloomily down upon his late-in-the-evening visitor. “I know pretty well what you’ve come to say,” he thrust in gruffly. “Suppose you say it and have it over with.” Oswald looked up in mild surprise. “I didn’t come here to scrap with you, David. And, so far as I know, I haven’t done anything to make you run at me with a chip on your shoulder. Of course, I know you are thinking I ought not to have come out here, but----” “What I may think doesn’t seem to cut any figure,” said David, with the air of a man who would rather precipitate a quarrel than avoid one. “I told you exactly and precisely what I thought a year ago as I was leaving Middleboro, and I haven’t had any reason to change my mind.” Oswald, ready enough in any legal matching of man against man, seemed helplessly nonplussed. “You have changed rather ferociously,” he remarked. “I don’t quite know how to take you. If you are giving me a fair shot at your present self, you are not the David Vallory I used to know.” “No, I am not the same. A little while ago I was trying my best to kill a man; I shall do it yet, one of these days, if he doesn’t keep out of my sight. But go on and say what you’ve got to say.”