"If I thought that," snarled the convict, "you'd never live to reach that door." "I shall live to see you hanged," said the other coolly. Here the mulatto slipped something into Roach's hand. "So you'll give me up?" said the latter in a peculiar voice. "I have said so." "Then, by the Lord! I'll be even with you!" Roach cried with savage triumph. "Do you see this, and this, and this?" fluttering a mass of folded papers before the other's eyes. "Ah! I was wise, I was, when I couldn't hide everything about me, to take the papers, and leave the weapons. I've got you now. Here's the lists that the old fool who is dead and gone to hell had hidden behind the gold! Here's enough to hang you and your d--d Cromwellians higher than Haman. There will be more than one giving up, I'm thinking! I've got you under my thumb, and I'll squeeze you!" "You cannot read; you do not know what those papers contain," said Landless steadily. "But I can," put in Trail smoothly. "I was but just running them over to our friend whose education has been so sadly neglected, when you came in." Landless drew a pistol from his bosom, cocked it, and leveled it at the murderer. "You see," he said with an ominously quiet eye and voice, "you were not altogether wise to leave the weapons. Now, give me those lists." "Damnation!" cried the convict, and Luiz Sebastian glided towards the door. Landless, quick of eye and active of body, saw the movement, and sprang backwards to the opening before the other could reach it. He covered the three with his pistol. "I will shoot the first of you that stirs," he said sternly. "You, Roach, lay those papers upon that bit of board, and push them towards me with your foot." "I'll go to hell first," was the sullen reply. "As you please. I will give you until I count twenty. If those papers are not in my hands, then I will shoot you like the dog you are." The murderer uttered a dreadful curse. Landless began to count. Roach made an irresolute motion of the hand that held the lists. Landless counted on, "fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen--" With another oath and a grin of rage Roach dropped the papers upon the board at his feet. "Now push it towards me," said Landless. With a brow like midnight the other did as he was bid. Still covering his men, Landless stooped quickly, and took up the precious papers, assured himself that they were all there, and placed them in his bosom. "Now," he said, leaning his back against the doorpost, and regarding the three baffled rogues with a grim eye, "I have a few words to say to you. I speak first to you, Trail, and to you, Luiz Sebastian. These papers have told you little that you did not know before. It was not the information that you gained from them that made them so valuable; it was the possession of them, the possession of actual proofs of this conspiracy which you might hold over our heads, or, if the notion took you, might sell to Colonel Verney?"