I had doped it out up there in the pen--that I was goin' straight.
That's all, isn't it? I told Slimmy I was through--but Slimmy held
something over me that was good for twenty years. What could I do? I
said I'd come in on this, figurin' that I could queer the game by
stallin'. I--I tried it. If you were here, you saw me. I pretended that
I couldn't open the safe, and--"

"_Can_ you?" inquired Jimmie Dale gently.

"That thing!" Birdie Lee smiled mirthlessly. "Why it's only a double
combin--"

"Open it, then," prompted Jimmie Dale.

Birdie Lee stooped impulsively to the dial of the safe; hesitated, then
straightened up again, and shook his head.

"No," he said. "I guess I'll take my medicine. I don't know who you are.
I might just as well have opened it for Slimmy as for you. It looks as
though you were after the same thing he was."

Jimmie Dale smiled.

"Stand a little away from the safe, Birdie--there," he instructed. And,
as the other obeyed wonderingly, Jimmie Dale knelt to the dial. "You
see, I trust you not to move," he said. The dial was whirling under the
sensitive fingers, and, like Birdie before him, his ear was pressed
against the face of the safe.

The moments went by. Birdie Lee was watching in an eager, fascinated,