For it presented to him in the most unexpected manner another and a new side of the strange and complex character of Stephen Ballantyne.
"Yes, why don't I destroy it ?" Ballantyne repeated.

"I ask myself that," and he took the photograph out of Thresk's hands and sat in a sort of muse, staring at it.

Then he turned it over and took the edge between his forefinger and his thumb, hesitating whether he would not even at this moment tear it into strips and have done with it.

But in the end he cast it upon the table as he had done many a time before and cried in a voice of violence: "No, I can't.

That's to own these fellows my masters and I won't.