“What a curious thing human nature is!” she commented, when he had made an end.  “My better judgment says you were all kinds of a somebody for not clinching the nail when you had it so well driven home.  And yet I can’t help admiring your exalted fanaticism.  I do love consistency, and the courage of it.  But tell me, if you can, how far these fair-fighting scruples of yours go.  You have made it perfectly plain that if a thief should steal your pocketbook, you would suffer loss before you’d compromise with him to get it back.  But suppose you should catch him at it:  would you feel compelled to call a policeman—­or would you——­”

He anticipated her.

“You are doing me an injustice on the other side, now.  I’ll fight as furiously as you like.  All I ask is to be given a weapon that won’t bloody my hands.”

“Good!” she said approvingly.  “I think I have found the weapon, but it’s desperate, desperate!  And O David! you’ve got to have a cool head and a steady hand when you use it.  If you haven’t, it will kill everybody within the swing of it—­everybody but the man you are trying to reach.”

“Draw it and let me feel its edge,” he said shortly.

Her chair was close beside the low-swung hammock.  She bent to his ear and whispered a single sentence.  For a minute or two he sat motionless, weighing and balancing the chance of success against the swiftly multiplying difficulties and hazards.

“You call it desperate,” he said at length; “if there is a bigger word in the language, you ought to find it and use it.  The risk is that of a forlorn hope; not so much for me, perhaps, as for the innocent—­or at least ignorant—­accomplices I’ll have to enlist.”

She nodded.

“That is true.  But how much is your railroad worth?”

“It is bonded for fifty millions first, and twenty millions second mortgage.”

“Well, seventy millions are worth fighting for:  worth a very considerable risk, I should say.”

“Yes.”  And after another thoughtful interval:  “How did you come to think of it?”

“It grew out of a bit of talk with the man who will have to put the apex on our pyramid after we have done our part.”

“Will he stand by us?  If he doesn’t, we shall all be no better than dead men the morning after the fact.”

She clasped her hands tightly over her knee, and said: 

“That is one of the chances we must take, David; one of the many.  But it is the last of the bridges to be crossed, and there are lots of them in between.  Are the details possible?  That was the part I couldn’t go into by myself.”

He took other minutes for reflection.

“I can’t tell,” he said doubtfully.  “If I could only know how much time we have.”

Her eyes grew luminous.

“David, what would you do without me?” she asked.  “To-morrow night, in Stephen Hawk’s office in Gaston, you will lose your railroad.  MacFarlane is there, or if he isn’t, he’ll be there in the morning.  Bucks, Guilford and Hawk will go down from here to-morrow evening; and the Overland people are to come up from Midland City to meet them.”