his conscience.

"The man in the moon, eh?" suggested Ricardo, in a jeering murmur.

Schomberg shook his head.

"It would be nearly as safe to rook him as if he were the Man in the
moon. You go and try. It isn't so very far."

He reflected. These men were thieves and murderers as well as gamblers.
Their fitness for purposes of vengeance was appallingly complete. But he
preferred not to think of it in detail. He put it to himself summarily
that he would be paying Heyst out and would, at the same time, relieve
himself of these men's oppression. He had only to let loose his natural
gift for talking scandalously about his fellow creatures. And in this
case his great practice in it was assisted by hate, which, like love,
has an eloquence of its own. With the utmost ease he portrayed for
Ricardo, now seriously attentive, a Heyst fattened by years of private
and public rapines, the murderer of Morrison, the swindler of many
shareholders, a wonderful mixture of craft and impudence, of deep
purposes and simple wiles, of mystery and futility. In this exercise of
his natural function Schomberg revived, the colour coming back to his
face, loquacious, florid, eager, his manliness set off by the military
bearing.

"That's the exact story. He was seen hanging about this part of the
world for years, spying into everybody's business: but I am the only
one who has seen through him from the first--contemptible, double-faced,
stick-at-nothing, dangerous fellow."

"Dangerous, is he?"

Schomberg came to himself at the sound of Ricardo's voice.

"Well, you know what I mean," he said uneasily. "A lying, circumventing,
soft-spoken, polite, stuck-up rascal. Nothing open about him."

Mr Ricardo had slipped off the table, and was prowling about the room in
an oblique, noiseless manner. He flashed a grin at Schomberg in passing,
and a snarling:

"Ah! H'm!"

"Well, what more dangerous do you want?" argued Schomberg. "He's in no
way a fighting man, I believe," he added negligently.

"And you say he has been living alone there?"

"Like the man in the moon," answered Schomberg readily. "There's no
one that cares a rap what becomes of him. He has been lying low, you
understand, after bagging all that plunder."

"Plunder, eh? Why didn't he go home with it?" inquired Ricardo.

The henchman of plain Mr. Jones was beginning to think that this was
something worth looking into. And he was pursuing truth in the manner
of men of sounder moral