"You need reminding in your turn that you are not paid to follow your inclination... Will you please go on with the story? I am curious to learn how it came about that Van Bleit boasted to you that the letters were out of our reach. What grounds have you for assuming such a statement to be true?" "Grounds!" Lawless laughed again, with a savage sound in the mirth. His mind had reverted to the scene on the veld in the early morning when Van Bleit had sat with a revolver covering him, and a murderous finger crooked round the trigger. "I have had what I believed to be those letters in my hands--a dummy packet got up in order to trick me. I fell into the trap with an ease that astounds me when I think of it. I've been flogged like a Kaffir--by Van Bleit... bound by the wrists and lashed." He touched his inflamed and injured eye. "I haven't recovered the proper use of that yet," he said. "I doubt that I ever shall. What little self-respect I had he has deprived me of... Perhaps that's why I don't care a damn when you openly question my honesty. That's a full report of my doings, up to the present. I am now waiting until my decoy has got Van Bleit in tow--then I am going to face him again." He fell to pacing the floor once more with his hands clasped behind him, and his eyes filled with an expression of uncontrollable hate. "When a man holds life cheaply--as I do,--when he's nothing to look forward to, and very little to look back upon, he makes an ugly enemy... You know something--not much, but still something--of my past. As I've gone along Life's High Road there has been a hand occasionally to rest in mine for a brief while; but at the first stumble it has been withdrawn,--not one has ever clasped mine more firmly to help me over the difficulties in the way... I'm not whining to you in self-excuse. I've knocked up against hard facts all my life... I'm hard myself, which may account for much. If it were not for a military training, I should probably hit you in the face when you accuse me of applying to my own use the money I have received from you. As it is, I ask you to withdraw that charge. It's possibly the only creditable thing I have achieved in life, but I have managed to steer clear of fraud." He put a hand in his breast pocket, and, withdrawing a notebook, took from between its leaves a paper which he tossed upon the table. "There's the agreement you referred to a while since... You can tear it across; it's not worth the paper it's written on. I'll stick to my part of the bargain. I'll get the letters for you, if they're to be got. But I want no other reward than the squaring of my account with Van Bleit. For the rest--the funds to go on with--"