"Stop a moment," I said. "I won't have my life on false pretences. I lost my nerve just now and played the coward; but, please God, I'll play the man again. I'm not Grant, it is true, and Grant is dead; but I'm your enemy, and I meant and mean to hunt you down. So knife me now if you want to, but before you do so, I'd like to ask your pardon for striking you, after you'd spared my life, and when you were unprepared. It was a cad's blow--a coward's blow--and I am ashamed of it." I stopped short, red-faced and choking. He gave an uneasy, abrupt laugh, and, rising, put back his knife. "Get up!" he said; "I guess you mean playing the game fairly. As for the bit of a blow, we'll say no more about it. Perhaps I deserved it. It does not do to think an opponent's beaten and means throwing up the sponge too early in the game. For what happens after I've heard your story--whether I kill you, as kill you I assuredly can this moment and in this place--I promise nothing till I've heard you out. This much, however, I will say. You tell me you are my enemy, and that you meant and still mean hunting me down. Well, that's straight talk, and I'll say this much of straight talk to you in return. If you are my enemy only, I wouldn't and couldn't kill you for any reason under the sun. If you're the enemy of the cause I have at heart, I'd find you out and kill you though all Scotland Yard itself acted as your bodyguard and protector. That's the state of the market, young man. First of all, let me ask you whether that yarn you spun in the opium den about your having come there by chance as an author in search of copy was true?" "Every word of it," I answered. "Well, now, tell me what you have been doing since, and how you came to be in this house, and in this garden. I have got to know, and it will go better with you, if you tell me with your own lips, than if you force me to find it out for myself, as I most assuredly shall. I don't want to kill you. It is horrible to me to have to take a life--unless the safety of the cause is concerned, and then I'd kill you or anyone else as unconcernedly--much more unconcernedly than I'd kill a superfluous litter of kittens brought into the world by the family cat." Doubt his sanity I might and did, but of his seriousness and sincerity I was in no sense sceptical. If I refused to speak, the chances were that I should not be allowed to leave the place alive. In the matter of personal strength, I was hopelessly outmatched, and as my revolver had dropped out of my hand when I had received the blow which felled me, and had been secured by him, I was, save for a pocket-knife, entirely unarmed.