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 looked over Pete and me, considering our qualities as prospective partners in the business which engaged them.

None of them was of the class of Bane; none of them harbored his almost evangelical intensity. I did not have to wonder what tremendous personal experience had turned them to his enterprize; the prospect of easy prey and loot was sufficient to explain them. They were practical souls of the sort readily swept together at the promise of wealth and power to be gained at no greater price than the risk of their necks.

None of them was capable of conceiving and designing the great plan which possessed Bane; mentally, cracked as he was, he was their leader. None of them contested that. They were banded together behind him—each for his own advantage.

Their women—the two wives and the two sweethearts—stood together in a somewhat more suspicious alliance. They did not comprehend as clearly as the men, I thought, the project on hand; but they knew it to be barbaric and magnificent and it fascinated them.