“You may set your uneasy mind at rest, Mr. Something.  Suspectin’ treachery comes natural to you—­being what you are.”

“There—­that’s enough!”

This was the third man, Mayer Zurich.  He sprang up, speaking sharply; a tall, straight man, broad-shouldered, well proportioned, with a handsome, sparkling, high-colored face.  “Eric, you grow more insolent every day.  Cut it out!”

Mr. Dewing, evenly enough, shifted his thoughtful gaze upon tall Eric, seemingly without resentment for the outburst.

“Well, wasn’t he insultin’ the boys then?” demanded Eric.

“I guess you’re right, there,” Mayer Zurich admitted.  “I was not at all in favor of taking so many of them in on this proposition; but I’m not afraid of them doin’ me dirt, now they’re in.  I don’t see why the three of us couldn’t have kept this to ourselves—­but Something had to blab it out!  Why he should do that, and then distrust the very men he chose for so munificent a sharing of a confidence better withheld—­that is quite beyond my understanding.  Dewing, you would never have clapped an eye on that nugget if I had suspected in you so unswerving a loyalty to the gang.  I confess I was disappointed in you—­and I count you my right-hand man.”

The speech of the educated man, in Mr. Zurich, was overlaid with colloquialism and strange idiom, made a second tongue by long familiarity.

“Your left-hand man!” Dewing made the correction with great composure.  “You come to me to help you, because, though you claim all the discredit for your left-handed activities, I furnish a good half of the brains.  And I blabbed—­as you so elegantly phrased it—­because I am far too intelligent to bite a bulldog for a bone.  Our friends in the Gavilan pride themselves on their nerve.  They are fighting men, if you please—­very fearless and gallant.  That suits me.  I am no gentleman.  Quite the contrary.  I am very intelligent, as afore-said.  It was the part of prudence—­”

“That is a very good word—­prudence.”  The interpolation came from tall Eric.

“A very good word,” assented the gambler, unmoved.  “It was the part of prudence to let our valiant friends and servants pull these chestnuts from the fire, as aforetime.  To become the corpse of a copper king is a prospect that holds no attractions for me.”

“But why—­why on earth—­did you insist on employing men you now distrust? you bewilder me, Dewing,” declared Zurich.  “What’s the idea—­to swindle yourself?”

“You will do me the justice to remember,” observed Dewing with a thin-lipped smile, “that I urged upon you, repeatedly and most strongly, as a desirable preliminary to our operations, to remove Mr. Peter Johnson from this unsatisfactory world without any formal declaration of war.”