Horace gazed with bewilderment into the hard-drawn, serious faces of the two men who sat across the little table from him. In the yellow lamplight these countenances looked like masks, and he searched them in vain for any sign of astonishment or emotion. The thing which was now for the first time being put into words was strange, but as it shaped itself in his mind he did not find himself startled. It was as if he had always known about it, but had allowed it to lapse in his memory. These men were thieves--and he was their associate! The room with its central point of light where the three knaves were gathered, and its deepening shadows round about, suggested vaguely to him a robber’s cave. Primary instincts arose strong within him. Terror lest discovery should come yielded precedence to a fierce resolve to have a share of the booty. It seemed minutes to him before he spoke again. “Then she was persuaded to mortgage her property, to buy over again at four times its value what she had already purchased?” he asked, with an assumption of calmness. “That seems to be about what you managed to induce her to do,” said the Judge, dryly. “Then you admit that it was I who did it--that you owe the success of the thing to me!” The young man could not restrain his eagerness to establish this point. He leaned over the table, and his eyes sparkled with premature triumph. “No: I said ‘_seems_,’” answered Wendover. “_We_ know better. _We_ know that from the start you have done nothing but swell around at our expense, and create as many difficulties for us and our business as possible. But the courts and the newspapers would look at it differently. _They_ would be sure to regard you as the one chiefly responsible.” “I should think we were pretty much in the same boat, my friend,” said Horace, coldly. “I daresay,” replied the New Yorker, “only with this difference: we can swim, and you can’t. By that I mean, we’ve got money, and you haven’t. See the point?” Horace saw the point, and felt himself revolted at the naked selfishness and brutality with which it was exposed. The disheartening fact that these men would not hesitate for an instant to sacrifice him--that they did not like him, and would not lift a finger to help him unless it was necessary for their own salvation--rose gloomily before his mind. “Still, it would be better for all of us that the boat shouldn’t be capsized at all,” he remarked. “That’s it--that’s the point,” put in Tenney, with animation; “that’s what I said to the Judge.”