e was pale as death, and I could see that this meeting,
added, like the piling of Ossa upon Pelion, on top of all that he had
already gone through, had robbed him of the shattered remnant of his
nerve.

Still, he was ready to "bluff" and brave if out while he could.
"Confound you!" he exclaimed. "What are you about? You must be mad to
attack a stranger without the slightest provocation. Let me alone, sir,
or I'll rouse the car."

"I wouldn't, you know, if I were you," I said coolly, for the more
excited he grew the more did my own calmness come back to me. "You've
been playing a dangerous game ever since you took your passage in the
American liner _St. Paul_ (or, rather, since Carson Wildred took it
for you), but you've never, perhaps, steered so close to the wind as
to-night, when you resorted to incendiarism as a finishing stroke."

The fellow stared at me in simulated nonchalance and defiance, but my
hand was on his shoulder still, and I could feel the shudder that ran
through his body.

"I say you must be mad," he reiterated.

"So you observed before; but I could very easily prove to you that I'm
not, if you were not already sure of it. You can call for assistance if
you like, but if you do the story I've got to tell will go flashing over
the wires back to 'Frisco, and on to Denver, and you will find yourself
in almost as hot a place as if you had stayed at the Santa Anna Hotel,
where you wanted the world to think that poor Harvey Farnham had been
roasted."

Once more the fit of shivering seized him. He glanced wildly about, as
though to find some means of escape, but there was none.

"I am a bigger man and a stronger man than you," I remarked, in a
significant and reflective manner. "Better hear the alternative I've got
to offer. I know everything, you see--that is, everything that concerns
_you_, and the curious game you've been playing.

"I've been just three days behind you everywhere since you left New
York. I've got every link in the evidence now, and what with Bennett, of
Denver, and the proprietor of the Santa Anna Hotel, and a few others, I
can burst your wretched little soap bubble plot in four-and-twenty
hours. There's just one way in which you can stay my hand."

"What's that?" He had spoken out impulsively, before he had stopped to
think. The instant the words were uttered he saw all that they admitted,
and bit his lip. But it was too late; he was completely trapped.

"I'll tell you," I said