“Hello, Seagreave,” called Hanson, still with his air of bravado.  “You’ve been a long time coming to that door.  I been sitting back in the bushes watching for you as patient as a cat watches a mouse-hole, with my gun all cocked and my finger on the trigger, ready to pick you off the minute you showed up.  Nothing against you personally, but the Black Pearl didn’t spare me, so why should I—­oh, you needn’t reach for your gun.  Good old Bob, ain’t that what the Pearl calls him, has got me covered.”

“So have I for that matter,” said Seagreave.

“All right, if it amuses you.”  Hanson shrugged his shoulders indifferently and leaned up against a tree which, growing before the cabin, had escaped the sweep of the avalanche.  “Lord!  Don’t I know what you two cut-throats stand ready to do to me?  And no one any the wiser.  Well, what the hell do I care?  But say, Seagreave, since we’re all having this nice little afternoon tea talk together, sociable as a Sunday school, it might do you good to take some account of the has-beens.  Here’s Bob, he had her before I did, but that ain’t taking away the fact that I had her once, by God!  I guess everybody understands that there’s more behind those emeralds than the pretty story we’ve all heard so often.  The Black Pearl certainly ain’t cheap.”

“Let him alone, Harry.”  Bob Flick’s voice arresting Seagreave in his swift rush toward Hanson had never been more liquid, more languid.  All through Hanson’s speech his face had not shown even a flicker of expression.  “This is mine.  It always has been mine, and I’ve known it ever since you and me, Mr.——­, I never can recall your name, but, then, yellow dogs ain’t entitled to ’em, anyway—­met in the desert.”

“I guess that’s straight.  You always had it in for me from the first night I saw her.  Well, you’ll only be finishing what she begun.  She broke me; she drove me straight to hell.  Maybe it was a mis-spent life I offered her, but when I met her I had money and success, I wasn’t a soak.  I still had the don’t-give-a-damn snap in me, and, even if you’re middle-aged, that’s youth.  But she’s like a fever that you can’t shake off.  And she don’t play fair.  But she’s the only one.  You know that, Bob Flick, and she didn’t have the right—­”

“I ain’t ever questioned her right, Hanson”—­Flick used his name for the first time—­“and I’m standing here to prove it now.  For the sake of Miss Gallito, because she once took notice of you, I’m going to treat you like you was a gentleman.  Here’s your gun.  Take your twenty paces.  And, remember, this ain’t to wound, it’s to kill.”

Hanson took the pistol and measured off the paces.  Then he turned and looked from one man to another with a smile of triumph on his evil face.  “Broke by the Black Pearl and then shot by her dog!  That’s a nice finish.  I can shoot some myself, but I ain’t in your class, Flick, and you know it.  I guess not.  I prefer my own route.”  He looked toward the cabin, where it seemed to him that Pearl or her shadow wavered a moment in the doorway.  “Here’s dying to you, honey,” and before either man could stop him he lifted his pistol and shot himself through the heart.