For a while they rode in silence back toward their camp. They passed under the aqueduct and entered the open plain. Then the parson stretched out his hand to the pommel of Driscoll's saddle. "Well?" he ventured softly. "Well, Clem, it's done." The others crowded their horses nearer. "I want to tell you all," Driscoll abruptly began again. "I want to tell you that I've just seen the strangest thing of my whole life, right back there in that tent. I--well, it's simply flattened me out!" "You mean Lopez, Din?" one asked tentatively. "Lopez? No, no, there's nothing strange in him. Any low hound will sell out to save his hide. No, Dan, I mean the other. I mean the old man. He's the one who used to run the blockade off Mobile, and a whiter-livered, more contemptible old grandmother I never hope to see anywhere, no, never! Yet not a month ago, the day of that Cimatario scrimmage, I found him on the battlefield, and he had been wounded. But he didn't seem to know it. He didn't even seem to know that the shells were still banging all around him." "An _old_ coward, too!" someone muttered. "But wait. He used to be one thing worse, one thing more, than a coward. He was a miser, and such a miser that he _made_ himself face danger. You should have seen him running a blockade, with the Yankees chasing behind. He trembled--I tell you, he trembled like a withered cottonwood leaf on a broken stem. Yet he whined against stoking with turpentine, because it cost a little more. I'd 'a' thought, I did then, that the miser was in his bones until the last trumpet. But to-night, back in that tent just now----" "Well?" "Well, he _refused_ money! He refused _gold_! He didn't seem to know what it was, any more than he did bullets a month ago. Escobedo asked him his price, and shoved a glittering heap across the table at him. You saw how he acted when we offered him something to eat? Well, he looked the same way at the gold. He acted impatient. He didn't want to see anything except Lopez. But you'd have called it a miser's eagerness, the way he watched that Lopez. Only a miser don't exult when it's someone else who pockets the money." "Maybe they'll divide?" "Not much, because Murgie could have had his share over and above. No, it wasn't that. It wasn't the gold. He was greedy--for a soul! He wanted to see Lopez _bought_, and no hitch. And when it was done, he wet those catfish lips of his with his tongue. I believe the devil in hell must look just that way when he gets some poor sinner. But to think of that old skinflint, to think of that old feeble cowardly shark not _knowing_ danger, not _knowing_ money----" "Come, Din," the parson's blessed, cheery voice interrupted, "let's hurry back and wash our hands. Then we'll _all_ feel better."