“Do you know anything about him personally?”

“No.”

“I do.  His father was a bank cashier, and he became a defaulter—­of the easy-mark kind; the kind that is too good-natured to look too curiously at a friend’s collateral.  He would have gone over the road if your father hadn’t pulled him out by main strength.”

“I see,” said Blount cynically.  “And the son has paid his father’s debt to my father.  But why the safe-blowing?”

“Collins’s face had to be saved in some way.  He couldn’t know that you meant to lock the dummy up in the safety vault,” returned Gantry, and then, after a pause:  “That’s our one little ray of hope, Evan.”

“I don’t see it.”

“Don’t you?  Then I’ll make it a bit plainer.  If some railroad burglar had cracked your safe, you could confidently assume that the original letters have been carefully cremated by this time, couldn’t you?”

“I suppose so.”

“But if your father has them ...  Evan, I don’t know any more than the man in the moon what he wants them for, but the man in the street would grin and tell you that your father was merely getting ready to hold the railroad company up for something it didn’t want to part with.”

“I’m letting you say it of my own flesh and blood, Dick; and it shows you how badly broken I am.  After all, it doesn’t lead anywhere.”

“Yes, it does.  Let us suppose, just for the sake of argument, that your father doesn’t know how much those letters mean to you—­I know it’s a pretty hard thing to imagine, but we’ll do it by main strength and awkwardness.  Let us suppose again, that being the case, that you go to him frankly and show him in a few well-chosen words just where he has landed you; tell him you’ve got to have those letters—­simply got to have them—­to save your face.  I know your father, Evan, a good bit better than you do; he’d give you the earth with a fence around it if you should ask him for it.”

Evan Blount got slowly out of his chair, stood up, and put his hands upon the smaller man’s shoulders.

“Dick, do you realize what you are doing for yourself when you show me a possible way of getting my weapon back?” he demanded.

Gantry’s lips became a fine straight line and he nodded.

“That’s what made me walk the floor a few minutes ago; I was trying to find out if I were big enough.  It’s all right, Ebee; you go to it, and I’ll throw up my job and run a foot-race with the sheriff, if I have to.  Damn the job, anyway!” he finished petulantly.  “I’m tired of being a robber for somebody else’s pocket all the time!”

Blount sat down again and put his face in his hands.  After a time he looked up to say:  “I can’t let you outbid me in the open market, Dick.  You can’t set the friendship peg any higher than I can.”

Gantry crossed the room and recovered his top-coat and hat from the chair where he had thrown them.