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"Think I want to be laughed at for a damn fool? I keep my mouth shut when I have troubles."

Seibert appeared to have lost his anger, and he seemed almost good-natured, agreeable; there was even a trace of awkward heartiness in his slightly rueful manner of relating the trick that he said Waller had played him, as if he wanted to smooth matters over; and his attitude was not convincing. He was a big, powerful man, round-faced, coarsely featured, with front teeth as large as an average man's thumbnail, with no ease of manner or smoothness of gesture; and his effort to be pleasant at this time appeared almost grossly affected.

"Why didn't you make him pay? Why steal it from poor old Tom Combe over a man's grave?" Brundage sneered coldly. Brundage's face was lined and lean and hard.

"Bah! That would have been a fight, and I am no pirate, to kill somebody for some money!"

"No," Brundage answered contemptuously, "but you steal it from a poor, broken-down old devil."

"Nothings I steal, you Brundage! I take what is mine and make no troubles."