Bat regarded the letter.  He watched the other lay it aside on a pile of papers.  He was thinking, thinking hard.  And his thought was mostly of the man whose shaking hand betrayed him.  Suddenly an explosive movement brought his clenched fist down on the table with a thud.

“Hell!” he cried, in a fury of impatience.  “What’s the use?  The danger sign’s hoisted.  I know it.  You know it.  Nisson knows it.  Well?  Say, Hellbeam’s been in Quebec a score of times since—­since—.  That don’t worry a thing.  No.  He’s got big finance in the Skandinavia bunch in Quebec.  We know all about that.  It’s Idepski.  Idepski ain’t visiting the packet office for his health.  He ain’t figgerin’ on a joy trip up the Labrador coast.  No.  That’s the signal, sure.  Idepski at the packet office.  Their darn mud-scow mostly runs here, to Sachigo, and there ain’t a thing along the way to interest Idepski—­but Sachigo.  We’ll be getting word from Charlie Nisson in some hurry.”

“Yes, we’ll get it in a hurry.”

Standing nodded.  He was transparently perturbed.  Bat watched him closely.  Then, in a moment, his mind was made up.

“See right here, Les,” he cried, in a tone he vainly endeavoured to restrain.  “I’ve figgered right along this thing would need to happen sometime.  You can’t beat a feller like Hellbeam all the time and leave him without a kick.  It don’t need me to tell you that.  But I want to get a square eye on the whole darn game.  Maybe you don’t get all you did to that guy when you cleaned him out of ten million dollars on Wall Street seven years ago.

“Say, you were a mathematical professor at a Scottish University before you reckoned to buck the game on Wall Street, weren’t you?” he went on, more moderately.  He forced a grin into eyes that were scarcely accustomed.  “One of those guys who mostly make two and two into four, and by no sort of imagination can cypher ’em into five.  I know.  You figgered out that Persian Oil gamble to suit yourself, and forgot to figger that Hellbeam was at the other end of it.  No.  The other feller don’t cut any ice with you while you’re playing around with figgers.  It’s only afterwards you find that figgers ain’t the whole game, and wrostling ten million dollars out of one of the biggest railroad kings and bank presidents in America has something to it liable to hand you nightmare.  Well, you got that nightmare.  So did I. You’ve had it for most the whole of the last seven years.  But it ain’t a nightmare now.  It’s dead real, which is only a way of sayin’ Hellbeam’s set his dogs on a hot trail, and we’re the poor darn gophers huntin’ our holes right up here on the Labrador coast.

“Oh, yes.  I know what you’d say.  You’ve said it all before.  Hellbeam hasn’t a kick comin’.  You were both operators on Wall Street.  You were both playing the financial game as all the world knows it.  You beat him on a straight financial fight.  It was just a matter of the figgers which it’s your job to play around with.