“I did make a mistake,” he confessed.

“You sure did.  It got me guessin’ some for a while.”

“But it don’t matter now,” Jim cried.  “Let’s see what you got.”

“It does matter,” Matt retorted.  “It matters a lot ... to me.  I’ve got to run all the risk.  I put my head in the trap while you stay on the street.  You got to get on to yourself an’ be more careful.  All right, I’ll show you.”

He dipped loosely into his trousers pocket and brought out a handful of small diamonds.  He spilled them out in a blazing stream on the greasy table.  Jim let out a great oath.

“That’s nothing,” Matt said with triumphant complacence.  “I ain’t begun yet.”

From one pocket after another he continued bringing forth the spoil.  There were many diamonds wrapped in chamois skin that were larger than those in the first handful.  From one pocket he brought out a handful of very small cut gems.

“Sun dust,” he remarked, as he spilled them on the table in a space by themselves.

Jim examined them.

“Just the same, they retail for a couple of dollars each,” he said.  “Is that all?”

“Ain’t it enough?” the other demanded in an aggrieved tone.

“Sure it is,” Jim answered with unqualified approval.  “Better’n I expected.  I wouldn’t take a cent less than ten thousan’ for the bunch.”

“Ten thousan’,” Matt sneered.  “They’re worth twic’t that, an’ I don’t know anything about joolery, either.  Look at that big boy!”

He picked it out from the sparkling heap and held it near to the lamp with the air of an expert, weighing and judging.

“Worth a thousan’ all by its lonely,” was Jim’s quicker judgment.

“A thousan’ your grandmother,” was Matt’s scornful rejoinder.  “You couldn’t buy it for three.”

“Wake me up!  I’m dreamin’!” The sparkle of the gems was in Jim’s eyes, and he began sorting out the larger diamonds and examining them.  “We’re rich men, Matt—­we’ll be regular swells.”

“It’ll take years to get rid of ’em,” was Matt’s more practical thought.

“But think how we’ll live!  Nothin’ to do but spend the money an’ go on gettin’ rid of ’em.”

Matt’s eyes were beginning to sparkle, though sombrely, as his phlegmatic nature woke up.

“I told you I didn’t dast think how fat it was,” he murmured in a low voice.

“What a killin’!  What a killin’!” was the other’s more ecstatic utterance.

“I almost forgot,” Matt said, thrusting his hand into his inside coat pocket.

A string of large pearls emerged from wrappings of tissue paper and chamois skin.  Jim scarcely glanced at them.

“They’re worth money,” he said, and returned to the diamonds.

A silence fell on the two men.  Jim played with the gems, running them through his fingers, sorting them into piles, and spreading them out flat and wide.  He was a slender, weazened man, nervous, irritable, high-strung, and anaemic—­a typical child of the gutter, with unbeautiful twisted features, small eyes, with face and mouth perpetually and feverishly hungry, brutish in a catlike way, stamped to the core with degeneracy.