Farendell was silent.  Possibly the truth of this had long since been borne upon him.  No one but himself knew the incessant strain of these years of evasion and concealment, and how he often had been near to some such desperate culmination.  The sacrifice offered to him was not, therefore, so great as it might have seemed.  The knowledge of this might have given him a momentary superiority over his antagonist had Scranton’s motive been a purely selfish or malignant one, but as it was not, and as he may have had some instinctive idea of Farendell’s feeling also, it made his ultimatum appear the more passionless and fateful.  And it was this quality which perhaps caused Farendell to burst out with desperate abruptness,—­

“What in h-ll ever put you up to this!”

Scranton folded his arms upon Farendell’s desk, and slowly wiping his clean jaw with one hand, repeated deliberately, “Wall—­I reckon I told ye that before!  You’ve been making us—­me and Duffy—­tired!” He paused for a moment, and then, rising abruptly, with a careless gesture towards the uncovered tray of gold, said, “Come! ye kin take enuff o’ that to get away with; the less ye take, though, the less likely you’ll be to be followed!”

He went to the door, unlocked and opened it.  A strange light, as of a lurid storm interspersed by sheet-like lightning, filled the outer darkness, and the silence was now broken by dull crashes and nearer cries and shouting.  A few figures were also dimly flitting around the neighboring empty offices, some of which, like Farendell’s, had been entered by their now alarmed owners.

“You’ve got a good chance now,” continued Scranton; “ye couldn’t hev a better.  It’s a big fire—­a scorcher—­and jest the time for a man to wipe himself out and not be missed.  Make tracks where the crowd is thickest and whar ye’re likely to be seen, ez ef ye were helpin’!  Ther’ ’ll be other men missed tomorrow beside you,” he added with grim significance; “but nobody’ll know that you was one who really got away.”

Where the imperturbable logic of the strange man might have failed, the noise, the tumult, the suggestion of swift-coming disaster, and the necessity for some immediate action of any kind, was convincing.  Farendell hastily stuffed his pockets with gold and the papers he had found, and moved to the door.  Already he fancied he felt the hot breath of the leaping conflagration beyond.  “And you?” he said, turning suspiciously to Scranton.

“When you’re shut of this and clean off, I’ll fix things and leave too—­but not before.  I reckon,” he added grimly, with a glance at the sky, now streaming with sparks like a meteoric shower, “thar won’t be much left here in the morning.”

A few dull embers pattered on the iron roof of the low building and bounded off in ashes.  Farendell cast a final glance around him, and then darted from the building.  The iron door clanged behind him—­he was gone.