“I do, mister.”

“And did Mr. Minchin?”

“He did.”

“You would tell him, of course?”

The sort of scorn was too delicate for John William Abel, yet even he seemed to realize that an admission must be accompanied by some form of excuse.

“I did tell him,” he said, “for I felt I owed it to him.  He was a good friend to me, was Mr. Minchin; and neither of us was getting enough for all we did.  That was what I felt; to have his own way, the boss’d ride roughshod over us both, and he himself only—­but that’s tellings again.  You must wait a bit, mister!  Mr. Minchin hadn’t to wait so very long, because I thought we could make him listen to two of us, so one night I told him what I knew.  You could ha’ knocked him down with a feather.  Nobody dreamt of it in New South Wales.  No, there wasn’t a hand on the place who would have thought it o’ the boss!  Well, he was fond of Minchin, treated him like a son, and perhaps he wasn’t such a good son as he might have been.  But when he told the boss what I told him, and made the suggestion that I thought would come best from a gent like him—­”

“That you should both be taken into partnership on the spot, I suppose?” interrupted Langholm.

“Well, yes, it came to something like that.”

“Go on, Abel.  I won’t interrupt again.  What happened then?”

“Well, he’d got to go, had Mr. Minchin!  The boss told him he could tell who he liked, but go he’d have to; and go he did, with his tail between his legs, and not another word to anybody.  I believe it was the boss who started him in Western Australia.”

“Not such a bad boss,” remarked Langholm, dryly; and the words set him thinking a moment on his own account.  “And what happened to you?” he added, abandoning reflection by an effort.

“I stayed on.”

“Forgiven?”

“If you like to put it that way.”

“And you both filed the secret for future use!”

“Don’t talk through your neck, mister,” said Abel, huffily.  “What are you drivin’ at?”

“You kept this secret up your sleeve to play it for all it was worth in a country where it would be worth more than it was in the back-blocks?  That’s all I mean.”

“Well, if I did, that’s my own affair.”

“Oh, certainly.  Only you came here at your own proposal in order, I suppose, to sell this secret to me?”

“Yes, to sell it.”

“Then, you see, it is more or less my affair as well.”

“It may be,” said Abel, doggedly.  And his face was very evil as he struck a match to relight his pipe; but before the flame Langholm had stepped backward, with his stick, that no superfluous light might fall upon his thin wrists and half-filled sleeves.

“You are sure,” he pursued, “that Mr. Minchin was in possession of this precious secret at the time of his death?”

“I told it him myself.  It isn’t one you would forget.”