“I sized you up for that kind of rat and was watching you,” continued Joe in his same awful grimness.  “I’m not going to shoot you, unless you make me.  I’m going to twist that pretty neck of yours.  But first, out with anything you’ve got to say for yourself!”

“I haven’t had anything to do with this business,” said Barney, trying to affect a bold manner.

“You lie!  I know that in this game against Dick Sherwood, in which you used my girl, you were the real leader!”

“Well—­even if I did use your girl, I only used her the way I found her.”

“You lie again!  I know how your kind work:  cleverly putting crooked ideas into girls’ minds, and exciting their imagination, so they’ll work with you.  Your case is closed.”  He turned to his one-time friend.  “What have you got to say for yourself, Jimmie Carlisle?”

Old Jimmie believed that his last hour was come.  He showed something of the defiant, almost maniacal courage of a coward who realizes he can retreat no farther.

“What I got to say, Joe Ellison,” he snarled in a sudden rage which bared his yellow teeth, “is that I’m even with you at last!”

“Even with me?  What for?”

“For the way you double-crossed me in nineteen-one in that Gordon business.  You never gave me a dime—­said the thing had fallen down—­ yet I know there was a big haul!”

“I told you the truth.  That Gordon thing was a fizzle.”

“There’s where you’re lying!  It was a clean-up!  And I knew you’d been cheating me out of my share in other deals!”

“You’re absolutely wrong, Jimmie Carlisle.  But if you thought that, why didn’t you have it out with me at the time?”

“Because I knew you would lie!  You were a better talker than I was, and since our outfit always sided with you, I knew I wouldn’t have a chance then.  But I reasoned that if I kept quiet and kept on being your friend, I’d get my chance to get even if I waited awhile.  I waited—­and I certainly got my chance!”

“Go on, Jimmie Carlisle!”

And Old Jimmie went on—­a startlingly different Old Jimmie, his pent-up evil now loosed into quivering, malignant triumph; went on with the feverish exultation of a twisted, perverted mind that has brooded long over an imagined injustice, that has brooded greedily and long in private over his revenge, and at last has his chance to gloat in the open.

“When you were sent away, Joe Ellison, and turned over your daughter to me with those orders about seeing that she was brought up as a decent girl, I began to see the big chance I’d been waiting for.  I asked myself, What is the dearest thing in the world to Joe Ellison?  The answer was, this idea he’d got about his girl.  I asked myself, What is the biggest way I can get even with Joe Ellison?  The answer was, to make Joe Ellison believe all the time he’s in stir that his girl is growing up the way he wants her to be and yet to bring her up the exact thing he didn’t want her to be.  And that’s exactly what I did!”