"Why ask _me_?" repeated the woman for the second time. It was only
too plain that she was fencing.

"Because you _know_," was Blake's curt retort. He let the gray-irised
eyes drink in the full cup of his determination. Some slowly
accumulating consciousness of his power seemed to intimidate her. He
could detect a change in her hearing, in her speech itself.

"Jim, I can't tell you," she slowly asserted. "I can't do it!"

"But I 've got 'o know," he stubbornly maintained. "And I 'm going to."

She sat studying him for a minute or two. Her face had lost its
earlier arrogance. It seemed troubled; almost touched with fear. She
was not altogether ignorant, he reminded himself, of the resources
which he could command.

"I can't tell you," she repeated. "I'd rather you let me go."

The Second Deputy's smile, scoffing and melancholy, showed how utterly
he ignored her answer. He looked at his watch. Then he looked back at
the woman. A nervous tug-of-war was taking place between her right and
left hand, with a twisted-up pair of ecru gloves for the cable.

"You know me," he began again in his deliberate and abdominal bass.
"And I know you. I 've got 'o get this man Binhart. I 've got 'o! He
's been out for seven months, now, and they 're going to put it up to
me, to _me_, personally. Copeland tried to get him without me. He
fell down on it. They all fell down on it. And now they're going to
throw the case back on me. They think it 'll be my Waterloo."