f the hotel. There's a gallery of twenty feet or more that
leads to it. Now, I was thinking that if the three of us were to visit
him some evening, just to wish him luck on his journey, as it were, and
if, while we were in the room something sudden was to happen which would
knock him silly for a minute or two, we might walk off with the stones
and be clean gone before he could raise an alarm."

"And what would knock him silly?" asked Williams. He was an unhealthy,
scorbutic-looking youth, and his pallid complexion had assumed a
greenish tinge of fear as he listened to the clergyman's words.
He had the makings in him of a mean and dangerous criminal, but not of a
violent one--belonging to the jackal tribe rather than to the tiger.

"What would knock him senseless?" Farintosh asked Burt, with a knowing
look.

Burt laughed again in his bushy, red beard. "You can leave that to me,
mate," he said.

Williams glanced from one to the other and he became even more
cadaverous. "I'm not in it," he stammered. "It will be a hanging job.
You will kill him as like as not."

"Not in it, ain't ye?" growled the navvy. "Why, you white-livered
hound, you're too deep in it ever to get out again. D'ye think we'll
let you spoil a lay of this sort as we might never get a chance of
again?"

"You can do it without me," said the Welshman, trembling in every limb.

"And have you turnin' on us the moment a reward was offered. No, no,
chummy, you don't get out of it that way. If you won't stand by us,
I'll take care you don't split."

"Think of the diamonds," Farintosh put in.

"Think of your own skin," said the navvy.

"You could go back to England a rich man if you do it."

"You'll never go back at all if you don't." Thus worked upon
alternately by his hopes and by his fears, Williams showed some signs of
yielding. He took a long draught from his glass and filled it up again.

"I ain't afraid," he said. "Don't imagine that I am afraid. You won't
hit him very hard, Mr. Burt?"

"Just enough to curl him up," the navvy answered. "Lord love ye, it
ain't the first man by many a one that I've laid on his back, though I
never had the chance before of fingering five and thirty thousand pounds
worth of diamonds for my pains."

"But the hotel-keeper and the servants?"

"That's all right," said Farintosh. "You leave it to me. If we go up
quietly and openly, and come down quietly and openly, who is to suspect
anything? Our