“Baca! I appeal to you. Help me! I’ll be honest. To pay out this sum will not ruin me, but it’ll cripple me so that it may take me years to recover. At the very best I shall lose far more than the pitiful remnant of the Drake money you leave me. Give me time to turn round! Give me thirty days!” “Thirty hours,” said Beck; “Monday morning.” “I tell you it will cost me two dollars for every one I pay over to you now,” the banker pleaded. “Let me give you certificates of deposit.” “That’s what you gave Drake!” said Scanlon. For the first time in the somber silence that followed they heard the loud clock on the mantel--tick, tock--tick, tock--tick, tock! Baca spoke at last slowly and thoughtfully. “Bennett, you have good standard securities in the El Paso National, pledged for a comparatively small amount, as I happen to know. You can sell them by wire and have the money here by the last train on Monday. That’s what you’d better do. Personally I am not inclined----” “Here is too much talk,” said Scanlon. “Cash or smash!” Bennett threw up his hand in a gesture of despair. “I’ll get it on Monday. Let me go home.” “There now! I knew you would do the right thing if we forced you to!” Baca went to the window. “It is not raining hard; so perhaps you had better go home, as you suggest, Mr. Bennett. You seem fatigued. But the rest of you will stay with me for the night, I trust. I have good beds; here is wine and fire; and we can have a quiet rubber. No stakes, of course.” He twisted his mouth and cocked an eyebrow at Beck. “I’m gone!” announced Beck. He brushed by without a glance at the others, jerked his hat and slicker from the rack, and flung out into the night. “Now who would suspect the urbane and lovable Beck of being so sensitive?” asked Baca, rocking on his feet. “We shall not have our whist game after all. You two will stay, however? Yes? That’s good!” said the host. “Have a glass of wine before you go, Bennett. No? Let me help you on with your raincoat, then. You have your rubbers?” He held the door open. “Good-night!” Chapter VIII Beck did not take his way to his own rooms despite the lateness of the hour. He followed the street at his left, the one that led to Bennett’s home. A little later the door opened and Bennett took the same path at a slower gait. A head projected itself cautiously above the adobe wall that fenced the Baca garden, looked forth swiftly, and vanished. After a few seconds the head appeared again, farther away, where a lilac overhung the wall. Screened by this background the head, with the body appertaining thereunto, heaved, scrambling over the wall, and followed, with infinite caution, the way of the two transgressors, keeping at a discreet distance behind the slower one.