"Binhart died seven weeks ago. He died in the town of Toluca, out in Arizona. He's buried there."
"That's a lie!" cried Blake, sagging forward in his chair.
"We had the Phoenix authorities verify the report in every detail. There is no shadow of doubt about it."
Still Blake stared up at the other man.
"I don't believe it," he wheezed.
Copeland did not answer him. He stepped to the end of the desk and with his scholarly white finger touched a mother-of-pearl bell button. Utter silence reigned in the room until the servant answered his summons.
"Bridley, go to my secretary and bring me the portfolio in the second drawer."
Blake heard and yet did not hear the message. A fog-like sense of unreality seemed to drape everything about him. The earth itself seemed to crumble away and leave him poised alone in the very emptiness of space. Binhart was dead!
He could hear Copeland's voice far away. He could see the returning figure of the servant, but it seemed as gray and ghostlike as the entire room about him. In his shaking fingers he took the official papers which Copeland handed over to him. He could read the words, he could see the signatures, but they seemed unable to impart any clear-cut message to his brain. His dazed eyes wandered over the newspaper clippings which Copeland thrust into his unsteady fingers. There, too, was the same calamitous proclamation, as final as though he had been reading it on a tombstone. Binhart was dead! Here were the proofs of it; here was an authentic copy of the death certificate, the reports of the police verification; here in his hands were the final and indisputable proofs.
But he could not quite comprehend it. He tried to tell himself it was only that his old-time enemy was playing some new trick on him, a trick which he could not quite fathom. Then the totality of it all swept home to him, swept through his entire startled being as a tidal-wave sweeps over a coast-shoal.