C. N. Williamson & A. N. Williamson: 30+ Murder Mysteries & Adventure Novels (Illustrated). Charles Norris Williamson
locket," I said. "I came from England to California to serve Miss Cunningham's interests, and I will not lay my hand upon her brother."
"I don't know what you mean," he said, sullenly.
"I'll tell you," I returned, "if you'll sit down here and listen to me for a few minutes longer. After that, as far as I am concerned, you are free to do as you choose. You look surprised–but whatever may have been your faults and your offences, I would stake my life you love your sister."
"She is the only being on earth I do love," he replied, still half dazedly.
Then he sat down, his eyes furtively on me, and I seated myself beside him.
"She is sacrificing herself for someone," I remarked. "I think I begin dimly to understand now who that someone may be. I think, too, that circumstances have given me the right to be inquisitive, as I can still further explain to you later on. Is Miss Cunningham going to marry Carson Wildred to save you from any unpleasant consequences of the past, for instance?"
He started as though he had been struck.
"She is not going to marry Carson Wildred!" he exclaimed.
"Oh, yes, she is, unless it can be prevented. I see I have even more to tell you than I thought. Is it long, may I ask, since you have seen your sister?"
"Last November," he said drooping his head, and bringing under my eyes again the hair that was like hers.
"Ah, that explains your ignorance. The man had not shown his hand at that time. Now I am going to trust to your affection for Miss Cunningham, to your presumable wish to save her from unhappiness, and talk to you as though we had been allies instead of enemies. Perhaps I may be a fool for my pains; but something seems to say to me—"
"Something says right. Go on!" he ejaculated, gruffly.
No doubt the very most dunder-headed of lawyers or detectives would have told me that I was mad, thus deliberately to give all my good trumps away to the treacherous, hired scoundrel whom I had been hunting down with the dogged ferocity of a bloodhound. On principle, of course, I was all wrong, and I knew it; but still I went on.
I told him the strange story of the past few weeks from beginning to end. I commenced with the part which concerned Farnham and Carson Wildred alone. I did not pass over that which had to do with Karine, my hopeless and unrequited love for her, my passionate anxiety to serve her at all costs; and I ended by declaring my certainty that Carson Wildred and Willis Collins were one and the same man.
"He is doubly a murderer," I said. "And yet, unless you and I together can keep him from it, he will be your sister's husband."
"I'll kill him first!" exclaimed my companion.
"I think the trick can be done without resorting to such extreme measures as that," I returned, "especially if you are willing to come over from his camp to mine."
He looked at me sharply for a moment without answering, then he said:
"You seem pretty quick, I've noticed, in what you've just been telling me at putting two and two together. Well, you say you were at the Santa Anna Hotel the night the murder was committed ten years ago. You knew there were two men mixed up in it. You remembered one of them; would you remember the other?"
"He was a mere boy," I said, "and it's a long time ago. He must have changed almost beyond recognition."
"He's just twenty-nine at present; I've good reason to know, as I'm he."
It was my turn to be astonished, but it was not policy to show it. Therefore I merely said, "Oh, indeed!"
"You see," he went on dully, "that's where Wildred has had his pull over me since he ran across me, by a piece of devil's own luck, in Canada five years ago. As you say, I have changed; but his eyes are like gimlets, they'd pierce a stone wall. It's quite true, as you suspected, that he and Collins are one. I knew him by a queer scar on his hand, shaped like a star–perhaps you've observed it? But he didn't mind. He seemed even to find a sort of pleasure in telling me how he had been to a clever fellow in Paris, and got himself made over into another man, so that he might the more easily turn his back upon various little episodes of the past. I couldn't have proved it if I'd wanted to, he was so different, and had worked up such a new record for himself to travel on. He knew that, and he knew, too, that I was in his power."
"I don't exactly see how that came about," I objected.
"Don't you? You're not so quick as usual, then. I'd been accused of the murder at the Santa Anna Hotel. I hooked it, and got over to Mexico, so to Spain and France. I'd always been a black sheep, you know, but that was the first really serious trouble I'd got into. However, as I said, five years later, when Wildred and I met, I was in Canada; I'd turned actor (I'd always a little talent that way), and was doing pretty well. He pointed out to me–and I wasn't very long in seeing his point–that I was not so much changed but what I should easily be recognised by those who had known me during those wild days when I'd been under his thumb in San Francisco, and the authorities there would still be very glad to hear of me. He didn't happen to want anything of me just then, but he allowed me to understand that it was to my interest to keep sweet with him. And from that day to this he's had his eye on me."
"But it was he who was accused of that murder, not you," I said.
"What!"
The man seemed either not to believe or understand me.
I repeated the statement, and then, when he stammered his astonishment, his ignorance of all that had taken place in San Francisco after his escape (at which we had all tacitly connived at the time), I went on to explain the true circumstances of the case. Carson Wildred had deceived him into the belief that he alone had been suspected–that if he were caught he would be promptly hanged.
"He has told the same story to your sister, I would swear!" I exclaimed, hotly. "It is for this reason that she has been persuaded into promising to marry him. Believing that he knows your whereabouts, and holds it in his power at any moment to have you punished as a murderer–believing, too, no doubt, that you did commit the murder, she has been ready to save your life by the sacrifice of all that has made hers dear."
"Curse him! I'd take my oath you're right!" he asseverated. "He's sly enough and vile enough for anything."
"Did you ever see Harvey Farnham?" I questioned.
"Yes, years ago I knew him well, and liked him immensely–as he did me, I think. It was in Tuolumne County, California, where he had a gold mine–the Miss Cunningham. It was I who named that, oddly enough it may seem to you, after my sister, of course. He wasn't aware of that, but thought it was just a whim of mine, that probably I'd admired some girl called 'Miss Cunningham,' and wanted to pay her a compliment. You see, no one knew me by my right name even then.
"It was before that hateful time when I got in with Collins, or Wildred, whichever you like to call him, and not long after I'd run away from home and England under the assumed name of Hartley–it was my mother's maiden name. I was only seventeen or eighteen, but I was pretty sharp for my years, I'm afraid, for I'd been among a queer lot already, and one night I would have got into a row with some older man over cards, a row that might have ended badly if it hadn't been for Mr. Farnham, who had dropped into the place to look on, and who stood by me for all he was worth.
"It seemed he noticed me the moment he entered the room, thinking that I looked enough like him to be his own son. Afterward he took me up, making a lot of me, wanting to find out where I'd come from, and all that. He thought my resemblance to him (which everyone who saw us together invariably remarked) a wonderful joke, and used to call me his 'boy,' and 'sonny,' getting it into his head that I was a sort of 'Mascot,' who brought luck to him in whatever he undertook. That was the principal reason, of course, that he was so keen on having me name his mine for him. I think if I had sowed all my wild oats, and been willing to settle down a bit into a respectable member of society, there was a time when he wouldn't have minded adopting me, for some old, unhappy love affair or other had kept him out of the marriage-market, eligible as he