"Briefly, then: the equity in this affair lies between you and the man who tried to kill you. I mean by this that the bonanza is either yours or his. If it were a partnership discovery there would have been no chance for one of you to overreach the other. You'll hardly deny that there was a sharp fight for possession: you both advertised that fact pretty liberally." Jeffard was listening with indifference, real or feigned, and he neither denied nor affirmed. "Go on." "From the point of view of an unprejudiced observer the evidence is against your partner. He comes here drunk and abusive, in company with two men whose faces would condemn them anywhere, and squanders his lead in the race in a supplementary carouse. And a little later, when he finds that you have outclassed him, he shoots you down like a dog in a fit of drunken fury. To an impartial onlooker the inference is fairly obvious." "And that is?"-- "That your partner is the scoundrel; that the discovery is yours, and that he and his accomplices were trying to rob you. I don't mind saying that this is my own inference, but I shall be glad to have it confirmed." Jeffard looked up quickly. "Then Bartrow hasn't told you"-- "Bartrow's message was merely introductory; two pages of eulogy, in fact, as any friendly office of Dick's is bound to be. He doesn't go into details." Jeffard put the tea-tray aside and with it the air of abstraction, and in a better light his interlocutor would not have failed to remark the swift change from dubiety to assurance. "Will you bear with me, Mr. Denby, if I say that your methods are a little indirect? You say that the evidence is against James Garvin, and yet you give me to understand that it will be well if I can clear myself." "Exactly; a word of assurance is sometimes worth many deductions." "But if, for reasons of my own, I refuse to say the word?" The promoter's shrug was barely perceptible. "I don't see why you should refuse." Jeffard went silent at that, lying back with closed eyes and no more than a twitching of the lips to show that he was not asleep. After what seemed an interminable interval to the mine-owner, he said:-- "I do refuse, for the present. A few days later, when I have done what I have to do, there will be time enough to discuss ways and means--and ethics, if you still feel inclined that way. May I trouble you to run that window-shade up?" He was sitting on the edge of the bed and groping beneath it for his shoes. The promoter admitted the light and ventured a question. "What are you going to do?" "Get on the ground with the least possible delay." The shoes were found, but when the wounded one bent to lace them the room spun around and he would have fallen if Denby had not caught him. "You're not fit," said the master of men, not unsympathetically. "You couldn't sit a horse if your life depended upon it."