When I finally wore them down and got to my little cell, I looked around it with a feeling of real coziness. I even patted the walls chummily and snapped a salute at the guard. It makes me grind my molars now to think of it. The way that bunch of stuffed shirts in the S.S.C. made a gold-barred chimpanzee out of me has broken my spirit and turned me into an honest trader. Me, Casey Ritter, slickest slicker in the Solar System, led like a precious infant right where I'd flatly refused to go! In plain English, I underestimated the enemy. Feeling safe and secure in the grip of the good old Iron College, I relaxed. At this strategic point, the enemy planted a stoolie on me. Not in my cell block. They were too smart for that. But we met at recreation, and his mug seemed familiar, like a wisp of smoke where no smoke has got a right to be; and after awhile I braced him. I was right. I'd met the shrimp before when I was wound up in an asteroid real estate racket. Pard Hoskins was his alias, and he had the tag of being a real slick operator. We swapped yarns for about a week when we met, and then I asked him what's his rap this trip. "Oh, a pretty good jolt if they can keep hold of me," he says. "I just made a pass at the Killicut Emeralds, that's all, and got nabbed." "Oh, no!" I moaned. "What were you trying to do, start a feud between us and Mars?" He shrugged, but his little black-currant eyes began to sparkle with real passion, the high voltage kind that only a woman in a million, or a million in a bank, can kindle in a guy. "Buddy," he said reverently, "I'd start more than that just to get me mitts on them stones again! Why, you ain't never seen jools till you've seen them! Big as hen's eggs, an even dozen of 'em; and flawless, I'm a-shoutin', not a flaw!" His eyes watered at the memory, yearning like a hound-dog's over a fresh scent. I couldn't believe it. Those emeralds were in the inner shrine of the super-sacred, super-secret temple of the cavern-dwelling tribe of Killicuts on Mars--the real aborigines. Bleachies, we call them, sort of contemptuously; but those Bleachies are a rough lot when they're mad, and if Pard had really got near those emeralds, he should be nothing but a heap of cleaned bones by now. Either he was the world's champion liar or its bravest son, and either way I took my hat off to him. "How'd you make the getaway?" I asked, taking him at his word. He looked loftily past me. "Sorry. Gotta keep that a secret. Likewise where I cached 'em." "Cached what?" "The rocks, stupe." I hardly heard the cut. "You mean you really did get away with them?" My jaw must've been hanging down a foot, because I'd just been playing along with him, not really believing him, and now all of a sudden I somehow knew that he'd really lifted those emeralds. But how? It was impossible. I'd investigated once myself. He nodded and then moved casually away. I looked up and saw a guard coming.