“You think I’m going right on taking chances on your weakness, Welch?” Allen’s counter-demand snapped with disapproval. “I’ll see this thing through, no matter how it hurts. Send for a surgeon if you know one who don’t insist on reporting gun-shot patients. Come, let’s get this animated interruption stowed away before the police arrive. Questions never asked are easiest answered.” “Leave us throw him in with the powder,” suggested a scar-faced bruiser new in the cast, so far as Pape recalled. And so they might have disposed of him had not Duffy advanced a better proposition. Nearby was a sort of cave where he had “hidden out” on a former emergency, he declared. It was dark and dribbly as a tomb—an ideal safe-deposit for excess baggage. “To the tomb with the scorpion, then!” Beneath his pudginess, the little lawyer seemed hard as the rocks he was so anxious to blast. With a gesture, he ordered one of the crew to help him on with his coat. Pape relaxed the more as three of them laid hold and carried him across the flat. Duffy acted as guide and the lawyer, who assuredly was taking no chances, went along to satisfy himself as to the security of the hide-away. Several yards inside the narrow mouth of Duffy’s “sort of” cave they dropped him upon the rock floor; left him without further concern over when, if at all, he should return to consciousness. For reasons which had filled him with such elation as nearly to expose his ’possum part, Pape approved their selection of the cave. Now the hope of victory out of defeat came to him with an admission of Allen from the entrance: “I do feel some weakened by this wound. Guess I’d better rest here a little while. You fellows go back and start turning rocks. Try the tilty ones first and use powder, when necessary, just as if I owned the park. Remember, I’ve got the permits.” For five minutes or more Pape waited without any effort to free himself except from the puddle of drippings in which they had chanced to deposit him. Since all seemed quiet, he made sibilant venture. “Jane ... _Jane_!” The shadowy figure which at once appeared from out the darker recesses assured him that luck had not entirely deserted him—that the safe-deposit vault selected for him was the same in which he had honor-bound the girl to watch and wait his summons. On entrance of his pallbearers, she had retreated into the depths of the “tomb,” quite as he had hoped she would. And now—in just a minute—he’d show them how alive was the dead man they had buried. She knelt beside him; was bending over him. “Oh, Peter—it is you, then? Are you hurt—wounded?” Her whisper was guarded as his own had been. “Yes—wounded sore but only in my feelings—over being outwitted.”