“Colonel Macon, I have never worked for money before and I shall not work for it now.”

“You trouble me with interruptions.  Who mentioned money?  You shall not have a penny!”

“No?”

“The reward shall grow out of the work.”

“And the work?”

“Is fighting.”

At this Donnegan narrowed his eyes and searched the fat man thoroughly.  It sounded like the talk of a charlatan, and yet there was a crispness to these sentences that made him suspect something underneath.  For that matter, in certain districts his name and his career were known.  He had never dreamed that that reputation could have come within a thousand miles of this part of the mountain desert.

“You should have told me in the first place,” he said with some anger, “that you knew me.”

“Mr. Donnegan, upon my honor, I never heard your name before my daughter uttered it.”

Donnegan waited soberly.

“I despise charlatanry as much as the next man.  You shall see the steps by which I judged you.  When you entered the room I threw a strong light upon you.  You did not blanch; you immediately walked straight into the shaft of light although you could not see a foot before you.”

“And that proved?”

“A combative instinct, and coolness; not the sort of brute vindictiveness that fights for a rage, for a cool-minded love of conflict.  Is that clear?”

Donnegan shrugged his shoulders.

“And above all, I need a fighter.  Then I watched your eyes and your hands.  The first were direct and yet they were alert.  And your hands were perfectly steady.”

“Qualifications for a fighter, eh?”

“Do you wish further proof?”

“Well?”

“What of the fight to the death which you went through this same night?”

Donnegan started.  It was a small movement, that flinching, and he covered it by continuing the upward gesture of his hand to his coat; he drew out tobacco and cigarette papers and commenced to roll his smoke.  Looking up, he saw that the eyes of Colonel Macon were smiling, although his face was grave.

A glint of understanding passed between the two men, but not a spoken word.

“I assure you, there was no death tonight,” said Donnegan at length.

“Tush!  Of course not!  But the tear on the shoulder of your coat—­ah, that is too smooth edged for a tear, too long for the bite of a scissors.  Am I right?  Tush!  Not a word!”

The colonel beamed with an almost tender pride, and Donnegan, knowing that the fat man looked upon him as a murderer, newly come from a death, considered the beaming face and thought many things in silence.

“So it was easy to see that in coolness, courage, fighting instinct, skill, you were probably what I want.  Yet something more than all these qualifications is necessary for the task which lies ahead of you.”

“You pile up the bad features, eh?”