The Complete Adventures of Hazard & Partridge by Robert J. Pearsall Page B

stepped out and Hardridge burst out at the same minute. The effect was that we faced each other in the well-lighted hall with Maxon midway between us.
    Hardridge looked—well, to exaggerate but slightly, like a devil’s nightmare come alive, crouching for the spring. For, of course, he instantly thought of me, whom he’d got into the habit of trying to kill.
    But he saw Maxon in the hall instead and then me over Maxon’s shoulder, and bewilderment flashed into his face and matched his rage. The doubt I’d tried to suggest to him, suddenly reinforced, checked his rush.
    I had intended, when I’d shaped matters so far, to put that doubt fairly in the form of a question, but John Maxon himself made it unnecessary, had answered that question before it was asked in a gesture of self-betrayal. He staggered back—threw up his hands.
    “Hardridge!” he croaked.
    Something in his right hand left a streak of light behind it, like a shooting star.
    And Hardridge, arriving at the truth too quickly for memory or logic, recognizing his enemy by a species of instinct, would have leaped in dreadful silence at Maxon’s throat. But I jerked my revolver up and covered them both.
    “One minute,” I said. “Well, Maxon. Yes, I’m the man. I’m the man your tool, Osborne, picked to take your place here. Keep back, Hardridge. No, there’ll be no killing here—not till I find out what it’s all about, anyway.
    “Speak up, Hardridge,” I ordered, turning from Maxon’s twitching features to Hardridge’s inflamed and deadly face. “What have you against this man?”
    “That, —— him!” exploded Hardridge. “That traitor and thief! He stole the money that would have saved me from prison—me and the rest of us. That coward and cur! Why, blast you,” this directly to Maxon, “you knew that without that money we were lost. The—reformers—”
    “He has a license to talk, he has,” quavered Maxon, standing sidewise in the hall, alternately glancing apprehensively at Hardridge and beseechingly at me.
    Unhappy, indeed, was his situation, his only hope of life being in me, whom he’d planned to dupe to the same death that now threatened him.
    “Who was he?” I asked Maxon. “Come to the point, quick.”
    “He! He was a dirty gambling-house keeper and dive-keeper and worse. King of crookdom through his pull in the City Hall. And the money he says I stole was a slush fund to keep the politician crooks in office. Because the other side won and he went to San Quentin where he belonged, he blamed me—”
    “You whining sneak,” cried Hardridge, “you were thick enough with us while the going was good.”
    “That’ll do, the pair of you,” I said. “I quite understand.”
    I did, well enough. Details were missing, but they were unessential. These two were part of the ring that had in the old days debauched the city government of San Francisco. To me that crime constitutes one of the baser forms of treason, and I admit my finger twitched to shoot them both.
    Then I thought of the sapphire. I’d formed no definite plan as to acquiring it once John Maxon had taken it out of its hiding-place. Circumstances must guide me, and here were the circumstances.
    I SUPPOSE in a way I was responsible for what followed. I suppose that my apparent indecision encouraged Hardridge, and I may even have stepped a little to one side. But I know I didn’t plan the thing or even foresee it. I did have a peculiar flashing vision of that dark cañon at the rear of the house, that dark cañon with its smooth, steep, narrowing sides and its floor dipping ever more rapidly toward the jumping-off place at the end.
    Anyway, all of a sudden Hardridge started for Maxon. Maxon did the natural thing for him; he whirled and ran. I could hardly have stopped him if I had tried. He brushed me back against Miss Maxon and half-way through the dining-room door, and Hardridge tore after him without a word.
    There was a chair near the end of the wall, and