“I have heard. ’Twas one Turk; some dull saturnine fellow that met an unchancy fate.”
“God help him! By such a name was he known. He took me into his employment here scarce a month before he was murdered.”
“The deuce he did.”
“Oh, sir! ’twas the first of my misdirected attitude towards you that I dreaded you would cast me forth did you learn my last service had been with a highwayman.”
“A highwayman!”
“He was indeed, were the truth confessed; as wicked and notorious an outlaw as ever hoodwinked the justices; and his name Cutwater.”
“Cutwater? Good heavens! Surely a past generation was familiar with it?”
“Well, I fear. This was the man—come hither to live on the fruits of his ill-gotten gains, and so to his dreadful fate. Mr. Tuke, he died—God pity him!—according to his deserts; but he left a terrible heritage of evil.”
The listener sat half-bewildered by the revelation. The little cloud that had once before gathered about his father’s memory, broadened and grew darker. From a thief of the road, then, had he passed on this pregnant estate to his son. Haunted in truth—perhaps as the price of blood, and the earnest of deeds too foul for mention.
“Go on,” he muttered.