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Rh "Aye, it was me."

"I could have done the job I wanted to do in a quicker way," he went on, after a second's pause, " but that wasn't my humor. I'd a mind to keep out of it myself, and I knew how to set the chaps on as would do it in their own way."

"What do you mean by 'it'?" cried Murdoch. "Were you devil enough to mean to have my blood?"

"Aye,—while I was in the humor,—that and worse."

Murdoch sprang up and began to pace the room. His strength had come back to him with the fierce sense of repulsion which seized him.

"It's a blacker world than I thought," he said. "We were friends—once friends!"

"So we were," he said, hoarsely. "You were the first chap I ever made friends with, and you'll be the last. It's brought no good to either of us."

"It might," returned Murdoch, "if——"

"Let me finish my tale," he said, even doggedly. "I said to myself before I came you should hear it. I swore I'd stop at naught, and I kept my word. I sowed a seed here and there, and th' soil was just right for it. They were in the mood to hearken to aught, and they hearkened. But there came a time when I found out that things were worse with you than with me, and had gone harder with you. If you'd won where I lost it would have been different, but you lost most of the two—you'd the most to lose—and I changed my mind."

He stopped a second and looked at Murdoch, who had come back and thrown himself into his chair again.

"I've said many a time that you were a queer chap," he went on, as if half dubious of himself. "You are a queer chap. At th' start you got a hold on me, and when I