Perhaps we would never have got anywhere, for a certainty, if it hadn’t been for the letter and the photograph that William Noyes sent me from Vermont, and which arrived the day following our journey through the passage. Short though it was, it served to clear up many matters to our complete satisfaction. It was addressed to me:
I am sending photo of that scoundrel, George Florey, brother of the dead man. I hope it helps you catch him. He always hated his brother, and my late wife told me that as far back as you want to go in her family you’ll find one brother hating another. I don’t know where to tell you to look for George. He and his brother both had spent most of their lives looking for a chest of treasure that was hidden by their grandfather down where you are—in Florida. They just took this name of Florey the last generation. Before that it was Hendrickson, my wife told me—and before that Heaven knows what. Mostly they were a bad lot.
After I had read it I showed it to Nopp; and he breathed deeply. But he made but one comment.
“Human nature is a winner, isn’t it, Killdare?” he observed. “Will we ever see the head and tail of it? Now let me see the picture.”
Neither Nopp nor Edith nor any one who looked at it could mistake the likeness presented in the photograph. It was not that of my suspect, Mr. Pescini. One glance established that fact. The well-bred, rather aristocratic face was none other than that of Major Kenneth Dell, he who had got himself invited to Kastle Krags, and who had died in the trap his grandfather had set nearly eighty years before.
Edith and I went over the case together, and we managed to fill up the breaks in each other’s story. We talked it over in the early evening, sitting in a secluded corner of the veranda.
She had already mostly recovered from the experience of the day before. She was still weak and shaken, but seemingly all serious complications had been averted. And she resolutely refused to stay in bed.
“It’s been a tragic thing, all the way through,” she began in the voice I loved. “It’s over now—but Heaven knows it cost enough lives. All for a treasure that no one knows for sure is a reality.
“I’m going over the case simply, Ned—and you tell me if I have it right. The letter shows that both George Florey and David Florey, the butler, were the grandsons of Hendrickson, who once owned this house—who of course was no one but the original Godfrey Jason. Jason too had hated his brother enough to kill him, and as the legend says, it was Jason who first buried the treasure in the lagoon.