Morgan Pell’s eyes, all this time, had never left his wife.  He studied her countenance as a pathologist might that of a person thought to be insane, and Lucia almost gave way under his relentless analysis.  “Red,” seeing the turn affairs had taken, quietly drew his gun, and Angela, frightened, put her hands over her shell-like ears.  If there was one thing she dreaded, it was a shot.  She was trembling like a leaf.  She closed her eyes.  She knew that “Red,” in his devotion to Gilbert, would not hesitate to kill Pell.

With an inscrutable expression, Morgan Pell murmured, “H’m!” Then he turned swiftly on Uncle Henry and asked, “You have proof, I suppose?”

“Proof?” cried Uncle Henry.

“Yes.”

“My Gawd,” the invalid fairly shrieked, “all you gotter do is look at ’em!  I been watchin’ ’em ever since you came.”

At this, Gilbert honestly believed that Uncle Henry had lost his reason.  Surely this was the insane delusion of a senile old man; and he said as much to Pell.

“Senile yourself!” cried Uncle Henry, mad through and through, feeling he was immune from any attack.  “Gol darn you!”

So there was no shutting Uncle Henry up!  Gilbert, in despair, turned to Pell.  “You don’t believe it!  You can’t believe it!” he said.  “This is madness—­”

Pell said not a word; he seemed to be in deep thought.  Suddenly his whole manner changed, his voice as well, and he faced Gilbert frankly.

“Certainly I don’t believe it.  My confidence in my wife is implicit.”

The metamorphosis was unbelievable.  At least Uncle Henry thought so.

“Well, I always heard that husbands was boobs!” he announced, sarcastically.

Angela at that instant opened her eyes and took her fingers from her ears.  Enough time had elapsed, she thought, for the worst to have happened.

“Has it gone off yet?” she naively asked.

“Has what gone off?” from Pell.

“Why, the gun, of course!” Angela replied.

“Gun?”

She looked at “Red.”  “He had one, and I thought maybe he’d shoot you, or maybe you’d shoot Gilbert, or maybe—­Aren’t you going to shoot him?”

“What for?”

“I thought that was what husbands always did!”

Pell smiled.  “Not sensible husbands, my dear.”  Then he faced Gilbert again.  “To go back to where we were:  I will admit that there is a possibility of oil in this property.  But it is only a possibility.”  The strain was broken.  Everyone looked relieved.  Lucia moved for the first time—­she had been like a frightened bird under the spell of a serpent.  “I’m a business man,” Pell went on, suavely.  “I’m willing to gamble twenty thousand dollars.”

“You will?” cried Uncle Henry.  There was no quieting him.  His life was one long question-mark.

“It’s a fair proposition, and, as far as I can see, your only way out, Jones.”  He had paid no attention to the old man’s interruption.  But the latter broke in once more: