"'Where have you hidden it?' he hissed to the senseless form before him. 'That box is not all you had. Where are the bonds and the stocks, and the money I helped you to save?'
"He was so absorbed he did not see me. He stooped by the bed and ran his hand along under the mattresses; then he lifted the pillows and looked under the bed. Then he rose and trod gingerly over the floor, as if to see if any of the boards were loose, and peered into the empty closet, and felt with wary hand up and down the mantel sides. At last his eyes fell on the clock, and he was about to lift his hand to it when I said:
"'The clock is all right; you needn't set it; see, it just agrees with my watch!'
"What a face he turned to me! I tell you it is no fun to meet such eyes in an empty house at one o'clock at night; and if you hadn't told me the police would be within call I should have been sick enough of my job, I can tell you. As it was, I drew back a foot or two and hugged the box a little more tightly, while he, with a coward's bravado, stepped after me and whispered below his breath:
"'You are making yourself too much at home here. If I want to stop the clock, now that my sister is dead, what is that to you? You have no respect for a house in mourning, and I am free to tell you so.'
"To this tirade I naturally made no answer, and he turned again to the clock. But just as I was asking myself whether I should stop him or let him go on with his peerings and pokings, the bell rang loudly below. It was a welcome interruption to me, but it made him very angry. However, he went down and welcomed, as decently as he knew how, a woman who had been sent to his assistance by Miss Thompson, evidently thinking that it was time he made some effort to regain my good opinion by avoiding all further cause for suspicion.
"At all events, he gave me no more trouble that night, nor since, though the way he haunts the door of that room and the looks he casts inside at the clock are enough to make one's blood run cold. Do you think there are any papers hidden there?"
"I have no doubt of it," returned Frank. "Do you remember that the old woman's last words were, 'The clock! the clock!' As soon as I can appeal to the Surrogate I shall have that piece of furniture examined."
"I shall be mortally interested in knowing what you find there," commented Mr. Dickey. "If the property comes to much, won't Miss Thompson and I get something out of it for our trouble?"
"No doubt," said Frank.
"Then we will get married," said he, and looked so beaming, that Frank shook him cordially by the hand.
"But where is Huckins?" the lawyer now inquired. "I didn't see him down below."
"He is chewing his nails in the kitchen. He is like a dog with a bone; you cannot get him to leave the house for a moment."
"I must see him," said Frank, and went down the back stairs to the place where he had held his previous interview with this angry and disappointed man.
At first sight of the young lawyer Huckins flushed deeply, but he soon grew pale and obsequious, as if he had held bitter communing with himself through the last thirty-six hours, and had resolved to restrain his temper for the future in the presence of the man who understood him. But he could not help a covert sneer from creeping into his voice.
"Have you found the heirs?" he asked, bowing with ill-mannered grace, and pushing forward the only chair there was in the room.
"I shall find them when I need them," rejoined Frank. "Fortunes, however small, do not usually go begging."
"Then you have not found them?" the other declared, a hard glitter of triumph shining in his sinister eye.
"I have not brought them with me," acknowledged the lawyer, warily.
"Perhaps, then, you won't," suggested Huckins, while he seemed to grow instantly at least two inches in stature. "If they are not in Marston where are they? Dead! And that leaves me the undisputed heir to all my sister's savings."
"I do not believe them dead," protested Frank.
"Why?" Huckins half smiled, half snarled.
"Some token of the fact would have come to you. You are not in a strange land or in unknown parts; you are living in the old homestead where this lost sister of yours was reared. You would have heard if she had died, at least so it strikes an unprejudiced mind."
"Then let it strike yours to the contrary," snapped out his angry companion. "When she went away it was in anger and with the curse of her father ringing in her ears. Do you see that porch?" And Huckins pointed through the cracked windows to a decayed pair of steps leading from the side of the house. "It was there she ran down on her way out. I see her now, though forty years have passed, and I, a little fellow of six, neither understood nor appreciated what was happening. My father stood in the window above, and he cried out: 'Don't come back! You have chosen your way, now go in it. Let me never see you nor hear from you again.' And we never did, never! And now you tell me we would have heard if she had died. You don't know the heart of folks if you say that. Harriet cut herself adrift that day, and she knew it."
"Yet you were acquainted with the fact that she went to Marston."
The indignant light in the brother's eye settled into a look of cunning.
"Oh," he acknowledged carelessly, "we heard so at the time, when everything was fresh. But we heard nothing more, nothing."
"Nothing?" Frank repeated. "Not that she had married and had had children?"
"No," was the dogged reply. "My sister up there," and Huckins jerked his hand towards the room where poor Mrs. Wakeham lay, "surmised things, but she didn't know anything for certain. If she had she might have sent for these folks long ago. She had time enough in the last ten years we have been living in this hole together."
"But," Etheridge now ventured, determined not to be outmatched in cunning, "you say she was penurious, too penurious to live comfortably or to let you do so."
Huckins shrugged his shoulders and for a moment looked balked; then he cried: "The closest women have their whims. If she had known any such folks to have been living as you have named, she would have sent for them."
"If you had let her," suggested Frank.
Huckins turned upon him and his eye flashed. But he very soon cringed again and attempted a sickly smile, which completed the disgust the young lawyer felt for him.
"If I had let her," he repeated; "I, who pined for companionship or anything which would have put a good meal into my mouth! You do not know me, sir; you are prejudiced against me because I want my earnings, and a little comfort in my old age."
"If I am prejudiced against you, it is yourself who has made me so," returned the other. "Your conduct has not been of a nature to win my regard, since I have had the honor of your acquaintance."
"And what has yours been, worming, as you have, into my sister's confidence – "
But here Frank hushed him. "We will drop this," said he. "You know me, and I think I know you. I came to give you one last chance to play the man by helping me to find your relatives. I see you have no intention of doing so, so I will now proceed to find them without you."
"If they exist," he put in.
"Certainly, if they exist. If they do not – "
"What then?"
"I must have proofs to that effect. I must know that your sister left no heirs but yourself."
"That will take time," he grumbled. "I shall be kept weeks out of my rights."
"The Surrogate will see that you do not suffer."
He shuddered and looked like a fox driven into his hole.
"It is shameful, shameful!" he cried. "It is nothing but a conspiracy to rob me of my own. I suppose I shall not be allowed to live in my own house." And his eyes wandered greedily over the rafters above him.
"Are you sure that it is yours?"
"Yes, yes, damn you!" But the word had been hasty, and he immediately caught Frank's