“You’re pretty confidential,” he said, slowly, looking the other up and down. “What’s to stop me going to one of Doogan’s men and squealing on the whole gang of you?” MacNutt smiled, gently and placidly, and stroked his short beard, touched here and there with gray. “And what good would all that do you?” he asked. “You _are_ a cool specimen!” ejaculated the other. “Oh, I guess I know men; and I sized you up, first thing, in the court-room. You’re the sort o’ man I want. You’re not a funker, and you’ve got brains, and—well, if you don’t come out of this quite a few thousand to the good, it’s all your own fault!” Durkin whistled softly. Then he looked meditatively out at the flashing motor-cars as they threaded their way up the crowded avenue. “Well, I guess I’m game enough,” he said, hesitatingly, still trying to sweep from his brain the clouding mental cobweb that it was all nothing more than a vivid nightmare. “I guess I’m your man,” he repeated, as they turned off the Avenue, and drew up in front of a house of staid and respectable brownstone facing, like so many of the other private houses of New York’s upper Forties. In fact, the long line of brownstone edifices before him seemed so alike that one gigantic hand, he thought, might have carved the whole block from a single slab of that dull and lifeless-looking brownstone rock. Then, following MacNutt, he jumped out and went quickly up the broad stone steps. “So you’re with us, all right?” the older man asked, as his finger played oddly on the electric button beside the door. Durkin looked at the blank glass and panels that seemed to bar in so much mystery, and his last quaver of indecision died away. Yet even then he had a sense of standing upon some Vesuvian-like lava-crust, beneath which smouldered unseen volcanic fires and uncounted volcanic dangers. “Yes, I’m with you, anyway,” he asserted, stoutly. “I’m with you, to the finish!” CHAPTER II