"No! you are the fool. I helped you get in here that we might square our account with him, not that you might cut his throat. You have lost your head. Do you want to hang?"
"Then have a little sense. I didn't think you rattle-headed. We are even with Merriwell now."
"No, I shall not be even with him till I have disgraced him as he disgraced me!" hissed Harris. "I have brooded over it for months. I have dreamed of it. Sometimes I have been unable to sleep nights from thinking about it. I have formed a thousand plans for getting even with the fellow, and now----"
"Now you would make yourself a murderer. Well, you'll have to choose another time to do that job. I am satisfied, and from this day I shall have nothing more to do with you."
"No; I am going to quit you, that's all, for I am satisfied that you will get us both into a bad scrape if I stick by you."
"All right; you can quit. You are too soft for me, anyway."
Harris tried to show his contempt for Mazarin in his manner as well as his voice, but the little man did not seem at all affected.
"You are too hard for me," he said. "I believe I was foolish in having anything to do with you."
They now stood looking straight into each other's eyes, and there was something commanding in the manner of the little man who had smashed Frank's apparatus and then wept like a child over the ruin he had wrought.
After some seconds, Sport's fingers relaxed on the handle of the knife, which fell to the floor, striking point downward and standing quivering there.
Mazarin stooped and caught up the knife, closing it and thrusting it into a pocket.
"After a while," was the quiet assurance. "Not now. I don't care to trust you with it till----"
He did not finish, but his meaning was plain. He believed Harris treacherous, and he would not trust the fellow till he was sure there would be no opportunity to use the knife on Merriwell.
But Sport's rage had cooled, and now he himself was sick at heart when he thought how near he had been to committing murder. Passion had robbed him of reason for a time, but now cowardice robbed him of his false nerve, and he was white and shaking.
Frank had watched the struggle between the two men with interest and anxiety, for he realized that his life might depend on the outcome.