ent that I am fully posted.
Unfortunately, however, there are others, besides myself, who are
acquainted with it. It is of those others that I am afraid. If the truth
must be told, and you don't mind a simple pun, I might say it is a case
of diamond cut diamond with us. I don't trust them, and I am not at all
certain that they trust me. Now, situated as I am, what I want to do is
to import another man into the concern, a man whose interests, though
they must not be aware of it, will be identical with my own. Two of us
would be a match for the whole pack of them. Particularly if I can get
hold of a man who can use a pistol as you can. Taken all round,
Mortimer, you're just the sort of fellow I want. You'd enjoy a piece of
adventure of this kind. We should be away about four months, and I don't
think you would be able to complain, when you returned, of having had a
dull time of it. Now what have you to say?"

"It is impossible," said Max, though in his own mind he felt that he
would have given anything to have been able to take a hand in it. "There
was a time when I should have liked nothing better, but I have settled
down to a staid business life now, and an affair such as you propose is
quite out of the question."

"I am sorry for that," answered Moreas, his spirits visibly sinking as
he heard the other's decision. "I had quite made up my mind that, when I
told you about it, you would throw everything else to the dogs and go in
for it with me. However, there is one good point about it. I have to go
south to-day. I shall be back in Rio in about six weeks' time. Nobody
knows how you may be situated then. If anything has happened, and it is
possible for you to change your mind, all you have to do will be to send
a letter to the old address, the same that I gave you eighteen months
ago, and it will find me. We shall start as soon after I return as
possible. Will you promise to bear this in mind?"

"I will remember it with pleasure," Max replied; "but you may rest
assured it will be of no use. I am clinging to respectability like a
limpet to his rock, and, so far as I can see now, nothing will shake me
from it."

"You don't know how I had set my heart upon having you with me,"
answered Moreas. "It is at times like this that one wants a good man at
one's elbow. I am not going alone with those other fellows; of that you
may be very sure. If I did, I'd never come back alive. With you at my
side, however, I wouldn't mind if