"So you're up to your old tricks again, are you, Birdie?" he inquired coldly. "Five years up the river wasn't enough for you--eh?"
The man drew himself up suddenly, and, squaring his shoulders, made as though to speak--and then, with a swift, hopeless gesture, turned his back, and, leaning over the top of the safe, buried his head in his arms.
A strange smile touched Jimmie Dale's lips. He stooped down, picked up the revolver from the floor, slipped it into his pocket, bent over Slimmy Jack for an instant to assure himself that the man was dead--then stepping back to the safe, he laid his hand on the ex-convict's shoulder.
"Birdie," he said quietly, "could you open this safe if you wanted to?"
The man swung sharply around, the prison pallor of his face a pitiful, deathlike colour in the flashlight's rays.
"A friend perhaps--if you can open that safe," Jimmie Dale answered.
"I mean that I want the _proof_ that you are straight," Jimmie Dale said softly. "I've been here in the room all the time. I want to know whether you were stalling on Slimmy Jack, or not. And I want to know, if you _were_ stalling, how you came to be here with him."
"That's a queer spiel," said Birdie Lee, in a troubled way. "I thought at first you were a bull--but you don't talk like one. Mabbe you're playin' with me; but, whether you are or not, I guess it won't make much difference what I say. You couldn't help me if you wanted to now--with him dead there"--he jerked his head toward the form on the floor.
"Tell me, anyhow," insisted Jimmie Dale quietly.
Birdie's hand lifted and swept across his eyes.
"Well, all right," he said, after a moment; "I'll tell you. Me and Slimmy used to work together all the time in Chicago and out West after I left New York, and until I came back here one day and pulled one alone and got sent up for it. Well, to-day, when they let me out of Sing Sing, Slimmy had come on from Chicago and was waitin' for me. He had a deal all fixed in Chicago that we was to pull together, a big one, and this little one here was to keep us goin' until the big one came off. He was with Malay John in this room to-day when a gambler from up the State somewhere blew in with a roll of about three thousand dollars, and handed it over to Malay to keep while he knocked around town for a day or two. Malay put the money in this safe here, and that's what Slimmy was after for a starter. I told Slimmy I was all through--that I was goin' straight. He wouldn't believe me. I guess you don't. I guess nobody will. I got a record that's mabbe too black to live down, and--oh, well, what's the use! I meant to live decent, but I guess any chance I had is gone now." His voice choked. "That's the way 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--"