The Sign of the Spider

"It does. Say, though, what game were you up to with that plaything?" glancing meaningly at the six-shooter lying on the table.

"This? Oh, I thought likely it wanted cleaning."

"So?" and the corners of Hazon's saturnine mouth drooped in ever so faint a grin as his keen eyes fixed themselves for a moment full upon the other's face. Laurence had forgotten the tell-tale imprint left in the centre of his forehead by the muzzle. "So? See here, Stanninghame, don't be at the trouble to invent any more sick old lies, but put the thing away. It might go off. Don't mind me; I've been through the same stage myself."

"Have you? How did it feel, eh?" said Laurence, with a sort of weary imperturbability, filling his pipe and pushing the pouch across the table to his friend.

"Bad. Ah, that's right! Instead of fooling about 'cleaning' guns at such times, fill your pipe. That's the right lay, depend upon it."

Laurence made no reply, but lighting up, puffed away in silence. His thoughts were wandering from Hazon.

"Broke, eh?" queried the latter sententiously.

"Stony."

"So? Ah, I knew it'd come; I knew it'd come."

This remark, redolent as it was of that sort of cheap prophecy which consists of being wise after the event, Laurence did not deem worthy of answer.

"And I was waiting for it to come," pursued Hazon. "Say, now, why not make a trip up country with me?"

"That sounds likely, doesn't it? Didn't I just tell you I was stony broke?"

"You did. The very reason why I made my proposal."

"Don't see it. If I were to sell out every rag of my scrip now, I couldn't raise enough to pay my shot towards the outfit. And I couldn't even render service in kind, for I've had no experience of waggons and all that sort of thing. So where does it come in?"

"It does come in. You can render service in kind – darned much so. I don't want you to pay any shot towards the outfit. See here, Stanninghame, if you go up country with me now, you'll come back a fairly rich man, or – "

"Or what?"

"You'll never come back at all."

In spite of his normal imperturbability, Laurence was conscious of a quickening of the pulses. The suggestion of adventure – of an adventure on a magnificent scale, and with magnificent results if successful, as conveyed in the other's reply, caused the blood to surge hotly through his frame. He had been strangely drawn towards this dark, reticent, solitary individual, beneath whose quiet demeanour lurked such a suggestion of force and power, who shunned the friendship of all even as all shunned his, who had been moderately intimate even with none but himself. This wonderful land – the dim, mysterious recesses of its interior – what possibilities did it not hold? And in groping into such possibilities this, above all others, was the comrade he would have chosen to have at his side. Not that he had forgotten the words of dark warning spoken by Rainsford and others, but at such he laughed.

"Are you taking it on any?" queried Hazon, after a pause of silence on the part of both.

"I am. I don't mind telling you, Hazon, that life, so far as I am concerned, was no great thing before."

"I guessed as much," assented the other, with a nod of the head.

"Quite. Now, I'm broke, stony broke, and it's more than ever a case of stealing away to hang one's self in a well. I tell you squarely, I'd walk into the jaws of the devil himself to effect the capture of the oof-bird."

"Yes? How are your nerves, Stanninghame?"

"Hard – hard as nails now. That's not to say they have been always."

"Quite so. Ever seen a man's head cut off?"

"Two."

"So? Where was that?" said Hazon, ever so faintly surprised at receiving an affirmative reply.

"In Paris. A press friend of mine had to go and see two fellows guillotined, and managed to work me in with him. We were as close to the machine, too, as it was possible to get."

"Did it make you feel sick at all?"

"Not any. The other Johnny took it pretty badly, though. I had to fill him up with cocktails before he could eat any breakfast."

"That's a very good test. I never expected you to say you had stood it. Well, you may see a little more in that line before we come through. Can't make omelettes without breaking eggs though, as the French say. Well now, Stanninghame, I've had my eye on you ever since you came up here. I'm pretty good at reading people, and I read you. 'That's the man for me,' I said to myself. 'He's come to the end of his tether. He's just at that stage of life when it's kill or cure, and he means kill or cure.'"

"Well, we had talked enough together to let you into that much, eh, Hazon?" said Laurence, with a laugh which was not altogether free from a dash of scepticism.

"We have. Still, I'm not gassing when I tell you I knew all about it before. How? you want to ask. Because I've been through it all myself. I thought, 'That chap is throwing his last card; if he loses, he's my man.' And you have lost."

"But what's the object of the trip, Hazon? Gold?"

"No."

"Stones?"

"Not stones."

"Ivory, then?"

"That's it; ivory," and a gleam of saturnine mirth shot across the other's dark features.

"You have to go a good way up for that now, don't you, Hazon?"

"Yes, a good way up. And it's contraband."

"The devil it is!"

Hazon nodded. Then he went to the door and looked out.

"Leave it open. It's better so. We can hear any one coming," he said, returning. "And now, Stanninghame, listen carefully, and we'll talk out the scheme. If you're on, well and good; if you're dead off it, why, I told you I had read you, and you're not the man to let drop by word or hint to a living soul any of what has passed between us."

"Quite right, Hazon. You never formed a safer judgment in your life."

Then, for upwards of an hour, the pair talked together; and when the luncheon bell rang, and Laurence Stanninghame took his seat at the table along with the rest, to talk scrip in the scathingly despondent way in which the darling topic was conversationally dealt with in these days, he was conscious that he had turned the corner of a curious psychological crisis in his life.

In the afternoon he took his way down to Booyseus. Would he find Lilith in? It was almost too much good luck to hope to find her alone. As he walked, he was filled with a strange elation. The dull pain of a very near parting was largely counteracted by the manner of it. Such a parting had been before his mind for long; but then he would have gone forth broken down, ruined, more utterly without hope in life than ever. Now it was different. He was going forth upon an adventure fraught with all manner of stirring potentialities – one from which he would return wealthy, or, as his friend and thenceforth comrade had said, one from which he would not return at all.

Had his luck already begun to turn, he thought? As he mounted the stoep Lilith herself came forth to meet him. It struck him that the omen was a good one.

"Why, you are becoming quite a stranger," she said. But the note of gladness underlying the reproach did not escape him, nor a certain lighting up of her face as they clasped hands, with the subtile lingering pressure now never absent from that outwardly formal method of greeting.

"Am I?" he answered, thinking how soon, how very soon, he would become one in reality. "But you were going out?" For she had on her hat and gloves, and carried a sunshade.