Feeling some justice in the charge, Thor began to excuse himself. "If
I've made a mess of my own, Claude, it's because--"

"Because you can't help it. Oh, I know that. No one can be anything but
a damn fool if he's born one. All the more reason, then, why you should
keep away from where you're not wanted."

By a great effort Thor managed to speak meekly. "How could I keep away
when--?"

"When you're a rubber-neck bred in the bone. No, I suppose you couldn't.
But you hate a spy and a liar even when he can't be anything else; and
the worst of it is--"

"Oh, is there anything worse than that?"

"There's this that's worse, that your spying and your lying weren't bad
enough till you got me into a fix where I have to look like a cad,
when"--the protest in his soul against the role he was compelled to play
expressed itself in a little gasp--"when I'm--when I'm not one."

The elder brother found himself unable to resist the opportunity. "If
you look like a cad, I suppose it's because you've acted like a cad.
It's the usual reason."

"Oh, there's cad and cad. There's a fellow who gets snarled up in the
barbed wire because he runs into it, and there's another who
deliberately lays the trap for him. The one can afford to crawl away
with a grin on his face, while the other lies scratched and bleeding."

It seemed to Thor that there was an opening here for a timorous attempt
to cry quits. "If it comes to the question of suffering, Claude, it
isn't all on one side. You may be scratched and bleeding, as you say,
and yet you can get over it; whereas I'm lamed for life."

"Ah, don't come the hypocrite! If you're lamed for life, as I hope to
God you are, it's because you've got a bullet in the leg--which is what
any one hands out to a poacher."

The relatively gentle tone was again the effect of a surprise stimulated
to curiosity. "When was I ever a poacher?"

"You were a poacher when you went making love to a woman who belonged to
another man, while you belonged to another woman."

"Very well," Thor said, quietly, after a minute's thinking. "I accept
the explanation. But I never did it."

"Then you did something so infernally like it that to deny it is mere
quibbling with words."

"All the same, I insist on making the denial."

Claude shrugged his shoulders. "I'm not surprised at that. It's exactly
what your type of cur would do. Unfortunately for you, I've the proof."

"The proof of what?"

"Of your torturing a p