“Don’t tell me _that_ was you too!” he snapped. Punch nodded. “I wasn’t waiting for you, though,” he said. “I didn’t have my rifle or anything.” “Oh, my God!” cried Raglan, with as deep a concentration of bitterness as I’ve ever heard in human voice. “Well, I know now,” he went on after a while, addressing Mr. Smith, “what my real mistake was. And I swear to God I’ll never make it again. I’ll never tackle another job where there are any damned boys on the premises.” “You know, that, I believe,” said Mr. Smith, “is a perfectly sound idea.” But Raglan was past being wooed back into a good humor. “I’m sick of this damned country anyhow,” he declared. “The profession’s being ruined by a lot of young hop-heads, hooligans, stick-up boys who shoot first and try to think afterward and find they haven’t brains enough. It’s no place for a gentleman, that’s the trouble with this country. I’m going abroad again.” “After you’ve served out your sentence for this affair, I suppose you mean,” said Mr. Smith. “Served out my sentence!” Raglan laughed. “I’ll go by the next boat. You’re going to take me down-stairs now, aren’t you, and see me out through the front door? And if you’re wise, you’ll send for a car to take me back to town.” “Punch,” said Mr. Smith, “go find your Uncle Alexander.” Punch was gone in a flash. Something else flashed too. Raglan saw it before I did and stiffened in his chair. Old Mr. Smith, with a steady hand, was pointing his automatic pistol straight at his head. “Don’t be a fool,” said Raglan. “I don’t intend to be,” said Mr. Smith. “Then listen,” said the thief. “Do you think I’ve been in this house four days without knowing what’s been going on in it? I know enough queer things about this family to put it on the blink for the next twenty years. I tell you what I’ll do unless you let me go, and let me go damn quick. _I’ll confess._ Just ask the women, any one of them, how they’ll like that. I know what I’m talking about.” Any notion I may have had that I’d found in Raglan an example of that romantic type endeared to the popular mind by scores of detective stories, a gentleman who has taken to a life of crime, but remains a gentleman none the less, had been dissipated during the past two minutes. The fellow, for all his airs, was nothing but a shabby-minded rascal. He had told us his story partly out of vanity, no doubt, but in the pretty confident hope that we could be blackmailed into letting him go free. I’ll confess to the pusillanimous notion that perhaps we’d better. I couldn’t tell what Mr. Smith thought. He said, with a perfectly expressionless face, “You don’t know the Corbin family as well as you think you do.” But, after all, this committed him to nothing, and he was interrupted before he could go any further.