“No need to go farther and fare worse, parson,” said he, equably.  “I saw that the first minute I could see anything but red.  Yet do you know, when she was telling us about it, I thought like a fool of everything but the right thing, from sandbagging and shanghaing Inglesby, down to holding up Hunter with an automatic?

“When I got my reason on straight, I went back to the starting point—­the letters, parson, the letter in the safe in Hunter’s office.  Given the letters she’d be free—­the one thing Inglesby doesn’t want to happen.  We’ve got to have those letters.”

My mouth was parched as with fever and I saw him through a blur.

“I don’t know,” he went on, “if you agree with me, parson, but to my mind the best way to fight the devil is with fire.  What did you do with those tools?”

“Tools?” in a dry whisper. “Tools, John?”

“Tools.  Kit.  Layout.  You had them.  Could you put your hand on them in a hurry to-night?  Don’t stare so, man!  And for the Lord’s love don’t you tell me you destroyed them!  What did you do with my tools?”

The four winds roared in my ears, and one lifted the hair on my scalp, as if the Rider on the Pale Horse had passed by.  By way of reply I placed a heavy package on the table before him, slumped into my chair, and covered my face with my hands.  Oh, Stanislaus, little saint, what had we done between us to-night to the Butterfly Man?

When I looked up again he had risen.  With his hands gripping the edge of the table until the knuckles showed white, and his neck stretched out, he was staring with all his eyes.  A low whistle escaped him.  Wonder, incredulity, a sort of ironic amusement, and a growing, iron-jawed determination, expressed themselves in his changing countenance.  Once or twice he wet his lips and swallowed.  Then he sat down again, deliberately, and fixed upon me a long and somewhat disconcerting stare, as if he were rearranging and tabulating his estimate of Father Armand Jean De Rance.  He took his head in his hands, and with slitted eyes considered the immediate course of action to which the possession of that package committed him.  One surmised that he was weighing and providing for every possible contingency.

Tentatively he spread out his fine hands, palms uppermost, and flexed them; then, turning them, he laid them flat upon the table and again spread out his fingers.  They were notable hands—­shapely, supple, strong as steel, the thin-skinned fingertips as delicate and sensitive of touch as the antennae he was used to handling.  They were even more capable than of old, because of the exquisite work they had been trained to accomplish, work to which only the most skilled lapidary’s is comparable.  Apparently satisfied, he drew the bundle toward him.  Before he opened it he lifted those cool, blue, and ironic eyes to mine; and I am sure I was by far the paler and more shaken of the two.