He turned to the tool box and took out a handful of nails and a hammer and he drove the nails into the papered walls and hung the watches upon them, letting them swing down by their glittering chains, ticking busily against the background of green bills with the lemon sheen of the electric light shining upon the metal watch casings, converting discs of yellow into blobs of liquid. Hardly had he hung up the last watch when the idea upon which he had been working extended itself; he took more nails from the tool box and went around the walls and drove them through the green paper and then took the box of rings and went from nail to nail and hung up the gold bands. The white and blue diamonds sparkled with quiet and brittle laughter, as though enjoying a hilarious secret. The room had a bizarre and ghostly aspect; the yellow light tinged the green money with a fiery cast and, against this blazing backdrop, the gold of the rings and watches, and the blue-white laughter of the diamonds, leaped burningly to life.

He was suddenly conscious of the gun sagging at his hip and he drew it from the holster. He had seen men fire guns in movies, but somehow his life had never led him to contact with firearms. A desire to feel the sensation others felt in firing a gun came over him. Someone might hear. . . . But if they did, they would not know where the shot had come from. Not in their wildest imagination would they think that it came from under the streets! He tightened his finger on the trigger; there was a deafening report and it seemed that the entire underground had fallen upon his eardrums and in the same instant there flashed an orange-blue spurt of flame that died quickly but lingered on as a vivid afterimage. He smelt the acrid odor of burnt powder filling his lungs. Abruptly he dropped the gun.

The intensity of his emotions ebbed and he picked up the gun and hung it upon a nail on the wall; then he hung up the cartridge belt. He saw the jars of diamonds and at once he had another idea. He lifted the jars and turned them bottom upwards and the entire contents dumped upon the ground. One by one he picked them up and peeled the tissue paper from them and piled them in a neat heap. He wiped his sweaty hands dry on his trousers, lit a cigarette, and commenced playing another game. He was a rich man who lived aboveground in the black sunshine and he was strolling through a beautiful park of a summer morning, smiling, nodding to his neighbors, sucking an after-breakfast cigar. Many times he crossed the floor of the cave, avoiding the diamonds with his feet, yet subtly gauging his footsteps so that his shoes, wet with sewer slime, would strike the diamonds at some undetermined moment. After five minutes of sauntering, his right foot smashed into the neat heap and the diamonds lay scattered in all directions, glinting at him with a million tiny chuckles of icy laughter. Oh, shucks, he mumbled in mock regret, intrigued by the damage he had wrought. He continued walking, ignoring the brittle fire. He felt that he had locked deep within his heart a glorious triumph.