Dounay. Tell her you stole them. Throw yourself on her mercy."
A sickly smile curled upon the young man's lip.
"Her mercy?" he repeated. "Do you think that woman has any mercy in her? She has got the worst disposition God ever gave a woman. She would tear me to pieces."
The young fellow again lifted a hand before his eyes, shuddering and reeling as though he might faint.
With a feeling almost of contempt, Hampstead gripped him by the shoulder and shook him sternly.
"Your situation calls for the exercise of some manhood—if you have it," he said sharply. "Tell me. Why did you come here?"
"To get you to help me out!" the broken man murmured helplessly, twisting his hat in his hands. "That was all. I won't lie to you. You've never turned anybody down. Don't turn me down!"
"It was on your mother's account?"
"No, I'm not as unselfish as that. It's just myself. I don't know what's the matter with me. I've lost my nerve. I had it all right enough when I took 'em, except for just a minute after; that's when I met you going away, and with that damned uncanny way of yours you dropped on that something was wrong. But I had my nerve all right; I had it till I got out there on the street this morning and that rope wasn't swinging there over the cornice. Damn the Red Lizard! All I ask is to get out of this, and then to get him by the throat!"
Surely the man had recovered a portion of his nerve, for at the thought of the failure of his partner in crime, his face was suffused with rage, and his weak, writhing hands became twisting talons that groped for the throat of an imaginary Red Lizard.
At sight of this demonstration, Hampstead leaned back
