“Just like you an’ me.”

“Not on your life,” Matt retorted.  “I’ll commit murder for ’em, but not for their own sakes, but for the sake of what they’ll get me.  That’s the difference.  Women want the jools for themselves, an’ I want the jools for the women an’ such things they’ll get me.”

“Lucky that men an’ women don’t want the same things,” Jim remarked.

“That’s what makes commerce,” Matt agreed; “people wantin’ different things.”

In the middle of the afternoon Jim went out to buy food.  While he was gone, Matt cleared the table of the jewels, wrapping them up as before and putting them under the pillow.  Then he lighted the kerosene stove and started to boil water for the coffee.  A few minutes later, Jim returned.

“Most surprising,” he remarked.  “Streets, an’ stores, an’ people just like they always was.  Nothin’ changed.  An’ me walkin’ along through it all a millionnaire.  Nobody looked at me an’ guessed it”

Matt grunted unsympathetically.  He had little comprehension of the lighter whims and fancies of his partner’s imagination.

“Did you get a porterhouse?” he demanded.

“Sure, an’ an inch thick.  It’s a peach.  Look at it.”

He unwrapped the steak and held it up for the other’s inspection.  Then he made the coffee and set the table, while Matt fried the steak.

“Don’t put on too much of them red peppers,” Jim warned.  “I ain’t used to your Mexican cookin’.  You always season too hot.”

Matt grunted a laugh and went on with his cooking.  Jim poured out the coffee, but first, into the nicked china cup, he emptied a powder he had carried in his vest pocket wrapped in a rice-paper.  He had turned his back for the moment on his partner, but he did not dare to glance around at him.  Matt placed a newspaper on the table, and on the newspaper set the hot frying pan.  He cut the steak in half, and served Jim and himself.

“Eat her while she’s hot,” he counselled, and with knife and fork set the example.

“She’s a dandy,” was Jim’s judgment, after his first mouthful.  “But I tell you one thing straight.  I’m never goin’ to visit you on that Arizona ranch, so you needn’t ask me.”

“What’s the matter now?” Matt asked.

“The Mexican cookin’ on your ranch’d be too much for me.  If I’ve got blue blazes a-comin’ in the next life, I’m not goin’ to torment my insides in this one!”

He smiled, expelled his breath forcibly to cool his burning mouth, drank some coffee, and went on eating the steak.

“What do you think about the next life anyway, Matt?” he asked a little later, while secretly he wondered why the other had not yet touched his coffee.

“Ain’t no next life,” Matt answered, pausing from the steak to take his first sip of coffee.  “Nor heaven nor hell, nor nothin’.  You get all that’s comin’ right here in this life.”

“An’ afterward?” Jim queried out of his morbid curiosity, for he knew that he looked upon a man that was soon to die.  “An’ afterward?” he repeated.