"David, you are _not_ big; you are narrow, narrow, _narrow_! Is there then no other code of morals in the round world save that which the accident of birth has interleaved with your New England Bible? What is conscience? Is it an absolute standard of right and wrong? Or is it merely your ideal or mine, or Shafiz Ullah Khan's?" "You may call it all the hard names you can lay tongue to," he allowed. "I'm not getting much comfort out of it, and I rather enjoy hearing it abused. But you are thrusting at a shadow in the present instance. Do you know what I did this afternoon?" "How should I know?" "I don't know why you shouldn't: you know everything that happens. But I'll tell you. I had been fighting the thing over from start to finish and back again ever since you blessed me out a week ago last Monday, and at the wind-up this afternoon I took the papers out of the bank vault, having it in mind to go and give his Excellency a bad quarter of an hour." "But you didn't do it?" "No, he saved me the trouble. While I was getting ready to go and hunt him, his card came up. We had it out in my rooms." "I'm listening," she said; and he rehearsed the-facts for her, concealing nothing. "What a curious thing human nature is!" she commented, when he had made an end. "My better judgment says you were all kinds of a somebody for not clinching the nail when you had it so well driven home. And yet I can't help admiring your exalted fanaticism. I do love consistency, and the courage of it. But tell me, if you can, how far these fair-fighting scruples of yours go. You have made it perfectly plain that if a thief should steal your pocketbook, you would suffer loss before you'd compromise with him to get it back. But suppose you should catch him at it: would you feel compelled to call a policeman--or would you----" He anticipated her. "You are doing me an injustice on the other side, now. I'll fight as furiously as you like. All I ask is to be given a weapon that won't bloody my hands." "Good!" she said approvingly. "I think I have found the weapon, but it's desperate, desperate! And O David! you've got to have a cool head and a steady hand when you use it. If you haven't, it will kill everybody within the swing of it--everybody but the man you are trying to reach." "Draw it and let me feel its edge," he said shortly. Her chair was close beside the low-swung hammock. She bent to his ear and whispered a single sentence. For a minute or two he sat motionless, weighing and balancing the chance of success against the swiftly multiplying difficulties and hazards. "You call it desperate," he said at length; "if there is a bigger word in the language, you ought to find it and use it. The risk is that of a forlorn hope; not so much for me, perhaps, as for the innocent--or at least ignorant--accomplices I'll have to enlist." She nodded. "That is true. But how much is your railroad worth?"