Inspector Puttis faces round at this, and beneath the stern, determined stare of the little man, Mr. Giles feels and looks very uncomfortable.
“Congratulate you on your luck. Lost son restored. Rich son-in-law. Debts forgiven. But,”—the police officer grins as he growls the next words,—“but you’ll not forget your friends? Awkward rather if Angland should happen to hear of your late contract with your niece, eh?”
“We won’t have a row about it!” exclaims Giles weakly, avoiding the Inspector’s gaze; “why should we? And look here,” he adds in a tone in which the bully gradually becomes discernible,—“look here, I’ve got copies of certain letters you’ve received from Lileth about Angland. Ah! that’s got you, has it? And I can prove you received them, that’s more. You can’t prove I had anything to do with ‘this arrangement,’ as Lileth calls it. I defy you to do it.”
“Don’t try it, old friend,” observes Puttis, pulling his moustache; “don’t try it. I’ve got the ‘joker’ to play yet. Don’t forget that.”
“You mean my nephew,” responds Giles. “I’ve squared him all right. And I can prove, moreover, that it was you got him a hiding-place at Ulysses. Can you beat that?”
“Yes!” hisses Puttis, whose inventive genius is only equalled by a valuable faculty he possesses for bringing all kinds of novel resources to his aid upon an emergency arising. “D’you remember the musical box Miss Mundella received from Brisbane a month ago?”
“What has that got ter do with all this?” asks Giles, looking in a puzzled way at the calm, firm face that is grinning coolly up at him.
“Well, old friend, musical box all sham. ’Twas a phonograph. All your talk taken down. Even your swear words.” The speaker pauses a moment, then adds, “Have another card to play. Do you want it?”
Mr. Giles remembers the fact of a so-called musical box having arrived at Murdaro, which Lileth had informed him, and with perfect truth, had been broken in coming up from the coast, and would not play. Like all ignorant persons, he has an almost superstitious dread of the more modern appliances, of which he has read such wonderful stories in that sole source of his information regarding the outside world, the weekly press. It never for a moment enters his head that Puttis is “bluffing him,” to use a colonial term. Giles has been flattering himself up to this minute that he is at last free from the machinations of his tyrant niece, and the horrible thought that she has still got him in her power, and can reproduce his late conversations with her by means of a phonograph, so flurries his loosely strung brain, that for a time he becomes quite unable to see that, for their own sakes, neither Puttis nor Lileth are likely to take that step, even if it were in their power to do so. It is not so much that he fears how he might suffer in body or estate at the hands of Angland, should his villainies be made patent; but rather a sneaking, cowardly horror of what his circle of squatter acquaintances would think of him, should they discover by means of this threatened exposé, how he, Giles, the man who has always loudly affected to consider woman as an inferior creation, has been all this time guided, even governed, by one—and a young one at that.
Before a minute has elapsed, however, the squatter has recovered considerably from the effects of the shock that Puttis’s words have dealt him, and his wits are sharpened by the very desperateness of his position.