"You
couldn't buy it for three."
"Wake me up! I'm dreamin'!" The sparkle of the gems was in Jim's eyes,
and he began sorting out the larger diamonds and examining them. "We're
rich men, Matt--we'll be regular swells."
"It'll take years to get rid of 'em," was Matt's more practical thought.
"But think how we'll live! Nothin' to do but spend the money an' go on
gettin' rid of 'em."
Matt's eyes were beginning to sparkle, though sombrely, as his
phlegmatic nature woke up.
"I told you I didn't dast think how fat it was," he murmured in a low
voice.
"What a killin'! What a killin'!" was the other's more ecstatic
utterance.
"I almost forgot," Matt said, thrusting his hand into his inside coat
pocket.
A string of large pearls emerged from wrappings of tissue paper and
chamois skin. Jim scarcely glanced at them.
"They're worth money," he said, and returned to the diamonds.
A silence fell on the two men. Jim played with the gems, running them
through his fingers, sorting them into piles, and spreading them out
flat and wide. He was a slender, weazened man, nervous, irritable,
high-strung, and anaemic--a typical child of the gutter, with
unbeautiful twisted features, small eyes, with face and mouth
perpetually and feverishly hungry, brutish in a catlike way, stamped to
the core with degeneracy.
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