"That's a cowardly lie!" I cried out again. "You're a coward and a liar, like all your sneaking kind, that skulk about dark corners, and crawl under beds, and arm yourself to the teeth, and stand ready to murder innocent women, to strike them down in the dark, rather than be found out! It's cowardice, the lowest and meanest kind of cowardice!" The sweat stood out on his face in glistening drops. "What's eatin' you, anyway?" he demanded. "What 'ave I done?" I pushed the cluster of women's jewelry closer to him. "You've done some of the meanest and dirtiest work a man can stoop to. You've skulked and crawled and slunk through the dark to rob women and children!" "Who's given _you_ a license to call me a coward?" "Do you dare to intimate there's anything but low and arrant cowardice in work like this?" "Just try it," he said with a grin that made his face hideous. "Why should I try it?" I demanded. "Do you suppose because I don't carry a jimmy and gun that I can't face honest danger when I need to?" I glanced round at my den walls, studded with trophies as they were, from the bull moose over the fireplace to the leopard pelt under my heels. The other man followed my glance, but with a lip-curl of contempt. He had jumped to the conclusion, of course, that those relics of encounter in the open stood as a sort of object-lesson of bravery which belonged to me in person. "Bah," he said, apparently glad to crowd me off into some less personal side-issue, "_that's_ all play-actin'. Get up against what I have, and you'd tone down your squeal. Then you'd walk into the real thing." "The real thing, black-jacking chambermaids and running like a pelted cur at the sight of a brass button!" I could see his sudden wince, and that it took an effort for him to speak. "You'd find it took nerve, all right, all right," he retorted. "And the kind o' nerve that ain't a cuff-shooter's long suit." My movement of contempt brought him a step or two nearer. But it was Benson who spoke first. "Hadn't we better have the police, sir?" he suggested. The burglar, with his eyes on my face, stepped still closer, as though to shoulder any such suggestion as Benson's out of the issue. "You just go out in the middle of the night," he went on, with derisive volubility. "Go out at night and look at a house. Stand off, and look at it good and plenty. Then ask yourself who's inside, and what's doin' behind them brick walls, and who's awake, and where a shot's goin' to come from, and what chances of a getaway you'll have, and the size of the bit you'll get if you're pinched. Just stand there and tell yourself you've got to get inside that house, and make your haul and get away with the goods, that you've got to do it or go with empty guts. Try it, and see if it takes nerve." I must have touched his professional pride. I had trifled with that ethical totem-pole that is known as honor among thieves.