"And the boy looked him straight in the face and smiled. 'I guess you've missed your trail, captain,' he answered. 'You see this path ends here; be careful, it's a frightful drop. It looks like an old Indian trail; there at your feet are the ashes of signal fires. But the road you want branches below the switchback. Your man probably doubled back through the timber and struck across to the south shore.' And then he added frankly enough, 'I, myself, came up here for a sight of my sloop. She was stolen, and an Indian I met on the mainland had seen such a boat near this island. He put me over in his canoe.'"
"Oh," said Alice, "you call him a boy, yet he could stand and say all that like any hardened criminal."
"No," Stratton flushed hotly, and for an instant the steel flashed in his eyes, "even you should not call him that. He had been told, and shown, that some of the best men on the border took advantage of the Government; that the United States was able to stand it. You should remember, too, it was his first—offence."
She gave him a straight, uncompromising look. "Was the chest found?" she asked.
"No. There was no trace of it below the cliff; he looked, afterwards, and the lake is very deep, as you thought. There was no proof against him; those inspectors never for a moment doubted him. The man, whom they had seen boarding the sloop with the chest at Victoria, was a desperate character, under suspicion before; they believed he had stolen the boat, and that he had come upon the Indian waiting for his passenger, and had bribed him to take him off the island instead. And the boy went with them down the switchback, and identified the wreckage on the north shore. And they took him aboard the cutter and landed him at home, in Seattle, the next day."
"I understand," she said slowly, "it all rested with him. It would have been a triumph, his salvation, if he had confessed."
"I knew it." Stratton's face hardened. "I knew it. You sit here like young Justice, inexorable; you who never were tempted; never made a mistake; and nothing but the fundamental right will do. But think how that confession would have hampered him. A story like that clings. His whole future hinged on that day. And he had the confidence of those prominent men; the truth must have involved them. After all," he added, "the opium was lost. He gained nothing, and he had his punishment in the wreck of his sloop."
"Yes," she admitted, "he was punished in a way, but—"
"Listen," he pleaded. "He was reared very differently from you. His father was a man of honor, true, but he had business interests that kept him long intervals from home. And his mother, I think, hardly gave him much thought when he was a child. She was a very beautiful woman with luxurious tastes. There was most always a gay company around her, and it could never have greatly concerned her how her husband's money was made, so that she had it to spend. I will not say much about her,—she is gone, now, out of his life,—but the boy was taught early not to trouble her, and to look out for himself. I believe the only lessons she ever gave him were in quick, flippant retort, and to cover his hurts. He learned early, too, that the surest way to please her was to amuse her friends. Once, when he came into a room, unexpectedly, and conversation dropped, she looked at him, smiling, and said, 'Boy, what is disgrace?' And he answered directly, 'Disgrace, mother, is being caught.'"
"And she?" said Alice, after a moment.