CHAPTER XVII

The Story of the Papers

Trafford went back to Millbank more seriously alarmed than at any time in his whole professional career. Matthewson would unquestionably inform the others that he had not the papers; and as certainly warn them he was after them, with the determination to secure them. It was well within reason that they would regard it as safer that they remained in the hands of a murderer whom they protected, than that they should fall into those of a detective, who would use them to convict and thus make them public. He felt that he must act promptly and energetically and bring to his aid every influence possible.

Now, however, there was another matter tugging at him. Few men in Maine ever attained to the possession of a hundred thousand dollars. The income on such a sum would equal his average yearly earnings. He believed that if he could put his hands on the papers, they would yield him that sum or more. If he was in danger, he had but to let it be known in a certain quarter that on obtaining these papers, he would deliver them intact, and the danger disappeared. He was satisfied that the man who made public the facts relating to Range 16 scandal would never live to see the result. He was satisfied that if the papers were once located in any person’s possession, there would now be no further time wasted in negotiation, as there had been with Wing; but that effective steps would be taken to prevent their publicity.

On arriving at Millbank, Trafford waited only to receive the report of his assistant, who had been left on guard, and then went at once to the Parlin homestead. He found Mrs. Parlin showing marks of the strain upon her of the last few weeks. Life had brought her many sorrows, and Wing’s tragic death had seemingly broken the last tie of joy. Trafford’s feverish impatience, rather than the trained restraint of his profession, spoke in the haste he showed to get at real issues.

“Mrs. Parlin,” he began, as soon as formal greetings were over, “what can you tell me of the Range 16 affair and the papers relating thereto?”

To his surprise Mrs. Parlin grew suddenly white and seemed on the point of fainting. He turned to her assistance, but by a strong effort she recovered a part of her usual self-possession, though the colour did not come back to her cheeks.

“Nothing,” she said. “It is a matter on which I can’t talk. You must not; you shall not torture me with it.”

“I would not willingly distress you in any way, Mrs. Parlin,” he said, with less abruptness; “but it is my duty to insist and I think it your duty to comply. Our whole search for Mr. Wing’s murderer may turn upon your answer.”

“Oh, has that come up to curse us again! has that come up!” she cried, wringing her hands. “I can’t bear it; I can’t bear it!”

Trafford was astounded at her growing agitation, and was half disposed to forego further questions, at least for the time; but behind him was the impulsion of his dread of, he scarcely knew what, driving him on to reckless impatience.

“It has come up and we can’t rid ourselves of it. Those papers were the cause of Mr. Wing’s death.”

“Those papers!” she repeated, with open lips, which scarcely moved as she spoke. “Those papers! But I hid them; no one knew where they were. Theodore did not even know of their existence.”

“You hid them!” exclaimed Trafford, thunderstruck at the statement. “They were stolen, I understand. How could you hide them?”

“Yes,” she said, like a bewildered child, admitting a fault; “they were stolen. I stole them.”

It was Trafford’s turn to sit dazed beyond the power of clear thought. She had stolen the papers to which her husband had given long months of work and thought, and on which he had hoped to build a reputation that should overpass the bounds of the State and outlive his years. She was the thief; and if report said truly, that theft had hastened his death and added bitterness to his last days!

“You can’t mean this, Mrs. Parlin,” he said gently. “I refer to the papers that were stolen from your husband’s desk some five years before he died; the papers that related to the Public Lands Office and the timber land and stumpage in Range 16; the papers that involved some men very high in the State and in the party--I won’t name them, if you please.”

She nodded assent to each of his propositions, and when he had finished said:

“Yes; those are the papers I mean. I stole them from his desk and hid them. I was going to destroy them; but I thought sometime they might be of use and not so dangerous, and so I hid them.”

“Where did you hide them?”

“First in the attic, then in the cellar, and finally under the bricks of the hearth in the parlour.”

“It’s easy, then, to find if they’re still there.”

Ten minutes sufficed to raise the bricks and show the hiding-place--a hollow cavity which had been devised in the early days for hiding purposes--empty.

“They are gone!” she cried as she glanced into the hole.

“Yes,” said Trafford, replacing the bricks and leading her back to Wing’s library, where they were less apt to be overheard, “they’re gone. Mr. Wing found them and, realising the alarm it would be to you to know that they were found, did not tell you. It was those papers that brought about his death.”

When Mrs. Parlin was sufficiently calm, Trafford set himself to the task of extracting the details of the affair; letting her at first tell it in her own way, and later asking questions that completed the story. Condensed to the facts, it ran as follows:

Nearly twelve years before, her husband, in the course of some investigation of a land title in the Public Lands Office, came across what appeared an error in an important entry. He was on the point of calling attention to it, so that it could be corrected, when a critical examination convinced him that it was not a mere error, but a carefully made change that involved the title to timber-land that was just becoming exceedingly valuable. Acting on the hint thus given, he went to work cautiously, but determinately, and personally got together a number of documents that revealed what seemed a systematic series of forgeries, relating to immense tracts of land that were formerly public. In some cases, the title to the land itself was involved; in others, that to the stumpage only.

It was impossible to carry on these investigations without attracting attention, especially when they had gone so far as to show that in every case where the title was suspicious, the benefit accrued to the Matthewsons and to the Hunters at Millbank. Mr. Matthewson was then Governor, but he had formerly been at the head of the Public Lands Office, and his financial prosperity had appeared to date from about the time he held that position.

A prying reporter got an inkling that something was going on, and in pursuing his enquiry revealed the hints he had discovered to Henry Matthewson. A position of financial importance was suddenly offered the reporter in a Western city and the story never was printed. But the Matthewsons were, from that moment, on their guard. A few months later, a fire broke out in the record room of the Public Lands Office and valuable records were destroyed. This did not attract especial attention, for the press had repeatedly called public attention to the existence of this very danger, and merely contented itself with shouting “I told you so,” with a great deal of strenuousness.

What was not known, save to Judge Parlin and, probably, some of the office force, was the extreme discrimination shown by the fire in destroying the very books on which proof of the forgeries depended. Certain remarks incautiously dropped by Judge Parlin let out facts from which the scandal took shape, with charges freely made by political opponents of the Matthewsons, which could now be proved only by papers in Judge Parlin’s hands, since the destruction of the original books. This was the Range 16 Scandal in its original form.

Up to this time, Judge Parlin had not even taken his wife into his confidence, but as the matter took more and more of public form, he deemed it necessary that she should know, especially as he had begun to suspect that the men who were against him would hesitate at nothing--not even murder, to conceal the truth. It was an incautious hint dropped by him to this effect that first alarmed her, and this alarm was speedily increased to terror by threats that were conveyed to the judge from time to time, though as to the source he was never able to reach a solution. “He laughed at them,” she said, telling of these threats; “but that is a man’s way. A woman sits and thinks and dreads, because she cannot act. In the dead night, I heard footsteps prowling about the place--or thought I did, and I lay in an agony of terror--not for myself, but because it was not for me that the danger threatened. When he was at Norridgewock at court and would drive home after dark, I sat and trembled until I had him again in my arms and knew that once more the chance had passed him by. If there came a ring at the bell late at night, I would plead that he let me answer it, until I wrought myself into a nervous terror that I cannot even now remember without a shudder. It was the worse because he was so brave and never for a moment felt afraid. When he laughed at the threats, I grew cold to my very heart, for my fear for him told me that the danger he scorned was so real that some day it would fall and crush him. A woman’s love knows some things that a man’s brain can’t compass!”

It seemed, however, that he attached importance of one kind to these threats, such as to induce him to guard the papers carefully, pending the time when he could duplicate them and place one set where they could not possibly be reached. But before this was even undertaken, Mrs. Parlin had become so alarmed that she urged her husband to abandon the matter and destroy the papers and let this be known where it would cause a cessation of the annoyance to which they were both subjected. But here she found him inflexible, and at last her terror reached such a pitch that she determined herself to steal and destroy the papers.

It was some time before she was able to carry this resolve into execution, and during the delay she reached a point of terror little short of insanity. At last, under the impulse of fear intensified by a particularly boldly expressed threat, she took desperate chances and, as desperate chances will do at times, succeeded. She took the papers from her husband’s desk almost under his very eyes, and ever after had the cruel pain of knowing that the trust she had betrayed was so great that no suspicion of the betrayal had ever crossed his mind.

Once in possession of the papers, she had, as she told Trafford, failed in the courage to destroy them, and had easily persuaded herself that they might at some time be an actual means of protection to her husband. Therefore she had hidden them, as stated, and thus finally they had passed into Theodore Wing’s hands to prove his death warrant.

The judge was much broken over the loss of the papers, the facts in regard to which could not be kept from the public. For a time, the scandal blazed up and the Matthewsons had to meet charges which could be proved by no one and which, therefore, they were the more bold in denying. Then public interest was turned to other issues, only to be aroused again for a time by Judge Parlin’s candidacy for the highest State court and his defeat, which he did not long survive.

“But when,” she demanded, “could Theodore have found these papers?”

“About two years ago, I should say; perhaps a little earlier,” said Trafford. “At least, it was then known that he had found them, for on no other theory can we explain the ransacking of his desk. He then began to carry them about with him, and the interests involved, which had rested quiet since your husband’s loss, and especially since his death, became disturbed again and active.”

“Then it must be the Matthewsons or Hunters who murdered him,” exclaimed the woman, under a sudden breaking in of light.

“It would seem a fair conclusion,” answered Trafford; “and yet I have evidence that satisfies me that they did not murder him and do not know who did. I don’t mean to say that they wouldn’t have done it finally; but they didn’t this time, and are not only puzzled, but much disturbed, over the mystery of the murder. We have gone so far on this matter that I can tell you in a word why they are disturbed. Whoever murdered him took the papers, and they are alarmed as to where they’ll turn up next.”

Mrs. Parlin had by the act of telling her story recovered her self-control and power to think, and saw as clearly as Trafford the meaning of this uncertainty.

“But who,” she asked, “could have done it, if they did not?”

“Some one who knew he had the papers. Some one who knew something of their value, and some one who knows the safety there is in boldness, and had the nerve to carry through an affair that might break down at any point. I knew long since that some one was with Mr. Wing in the evening after you left him, and that the visitor stayed very late. I also know that, contrary to what was generally supposed, this room was visited after the murder. Some one passed over his dead body, entered the room, and took the papers. The question is, who was bold enough to commit the theft under such conditions?”

The picture that Trafford drew of the murder and the theft stirred Mrs. Parlin, already wrought upon by the interview, to a state of nervous excitement that was most distressing. Too late, the detective realised that in such a state she was scarcely a safe custodian for the secret he had given into her keeping. She walked the room, wringing her hands and asking herself:

“Why didn’t I burn them; why didn’t I burn them? I might at least have saved Theodore! I am his murderer.”

It was late when Trafford had quieted her so that he dared trust her even with Mary Mullin. Even this he did not do, without first giving her a stern warning as to the necessity of self-restraint.

“We’re on the last stretch now,” he said. “What’s done must be done quickly and silently. These men haven’t committed murder yet, but they wouldn’t hesitate to, if they were once convinced that safety lay in that direction. In forty-eight hours they’ll see that it’s safer for this murder to remain a mystery, and then it’ll be dangerous to move--it may mean death. Can you keep still on this subject two days?”

“I kept still for eight years while I saw my husband crushed,” she said reproachfully.

As he was turning away, oppressed with the thought that he was pitted against men who would hesitate at nothing and who, as soon as a conference was had, must see that their interests lay in thwarting his efforts, she caught him by the coat and drew him towards her.

“There’s been blood enough shed,” she said. “These papers killed my husband, though I stole them in the hope of saving his life. They’ve killed Theodore. Don’t let them kill any more folks. Burn them, burn them, when you get hold of them!”

“But you want me to catch Mr. Wing’s murderer, don’t you? You want him sent to Thomaston?”

“Yes; yes!” Her eyes blazed with the desire of revenge. “Don’t let him escape! But burn the papers!”

He lingered still, though he felt that he was wasting precious time. He seemed to be in the one place of safety, and a strange dread, which he knew foreign to his nature and profession, assailed him. He had never experienced it before and it seemed a premonition of coming evil. As he turned finally to go, she said again:

“Don’t move alone. You can’t do better than take Mr. McManus’s advice. The judge had every confidence in him, and so, I think, had Theodore. You’ll be safer if some one knows what you are doing. Tell him everything and keep somebody by you all the time. Catch Theodore’s murderer, and when you get him and the papers, burn the papers: don’t let them cause any more bloodshed.”

“I shan’t move without Mr. McManus,” he assured her. “He is cool-headed and resourceful. I’ll catch Mr. Wing’s murderer and I’ll put an end to the mischief those papers can do.”

Nevertheless, there was the sense of oppression and danger hanging over him. He was doubting himself--doubting himself, from the moment Matthewson had assured him that he would give a hundred thousand dollars for the papers. Suppose he should find them, would he have strength to put that offer from him? As he asked this question, he realised that the fear that weighed on him was rather the fear born of a sense of moral degradation than fear of bodily harm. He knew as absolutely as if the thing was done that, if once he was in possession of the papers, he would sell them to Matthewson; and while he knew it and hated himself for being capable of doing it, he went steadily on the course which could have no other ending.