"Very well; now for the crux. This man knelt behind a locked door and heard himself execrated by the man he was trying to save; heard the first kindly impulse he had yielded to in months distorted into a desperate plan to rob the cursing maniac. Is it past belief that he crept away from the locked door and sat down to ask himself in hot resentment why he should go on? Is it not conceivable that he should have begun to give ear to the plea of self-preservation?--to say to himself that if the maniac were no better than a lost man it was no reason that the treasure should be lost also?" It was altogether conceivable, and Lansdale nodded again. Jeffard found a cigar and went on while he was clipping the end of it. "But that was not all. Picture this man at the crumbling point of resolution tiptoeing to the door to listen again. He has heard enough to convince him that the miracle of fortune will be worse than wasted upon the drunken witling. Now he is to hear that the besotted fool has already transferred whatever right he had in the Midas to the two despoilers; signed a quitclaim, sold his miracle for a drink or two of whiskey, more or less. Are you listening?" Lansdale moistened his lips with the lees of the tea in the empty cup, and said, "Yes; go on." Jeffard sat back and lighted the cigar. "That's all," he said curtly. "It's enough, isn't it? You knew the man a year ago; you think you know him now. What would he do?" If the hypothesis were intended to be a test of blind loyalty it missed the mark by just so much as the student of his kind must hold himself aloof from sympathetic entanglements. Lansdale weighed the evidence, not as a partisan, but rather as an onlooker whose point of view was wholly extrinsic. "I understand," said he; "the man would do as you have done. It's your own affair. As I said a few minutes ago, it is between you and your private conscience. And I dare say if the facts were known the public conscience wouldn't condemn you. Don't you want to use the columns of the 'Coloradoan'?" Jeffard's negative was explosive. "Do you write me down a fool as well as a knave? Damn the public conscience!" "Don't swear; I was only offering to turn the stone for you if you've anything to grind." "I haven't. If I wanted the consent of the majority I could buy it,--buy it if I had shot the maniac instead of letting him shoot me." "Possibly; and yet you couldn't buy any fraction of it that is worth having," Lansdale asserted, with conviction. "There are a few people left who have not bowed the head in the house of Rimmon." The cynical hardness went out of Jeffard's eye and lip, and for the first time since the proletary's reincarnation, Lansdale fancied he got a brief glimpse of the man he had known in the day of sincerity. "A few, yes; the Elliotts, father and daughter, for two, you would say. I wonder if you could help me there." "To their good opinion?--my dear Jeffard, I'm no professional conscience-keeper!"