Unfortunately the weaker instinct of Harcourt's nature was first roused; the vulgar rage which confounds the bearer of ill news with the news itself filled his breast. “And this is all that your confounded intermeddling came to?” he said brutally.
“No,” said Grant quietly, with a preoccupied ignoring of the insult that was more hopeless for Harcourt. “I found out that it is claimed that this 'Lige Curtis was not drowned nor lost that night; but that he escaped, and for three years has convinced another man that you are wrongfully in possession of this land; that these two naturally hold you in their power, and that they are only waiting for you to be forced into legal proceedings for slander to prove all their charges. Until then, for some reason best known to themselves, Curtis remains in the background.”
“Does he deny the deed under which I hold the property?” said Harcourt savagely.
“He says it was only a security for a trifling loan, and not an actual transfer.”
“And don't those fools know that his security could be forfeited?”
“Yes, but not in the way it is recorded in the county clerk's office. They say that the record shows that there was an interpolation in the paper he left with you—which was a forgery. Briefly, Harcourt, you are accused of that. More,—it is intimated that when he fell into the creek that night, and escaped on a raft that was floating past, that he had been first stunned by a blow from some one interested in getting rid of him.”
He paused and glanced out of the window.
“Is that all?” asked Harcourt in a perfectly quiet, steady, voice.
“All!” replied Grant, struck with the change in his companion's manner, and turning his eyes upon him quickly.
The change indeed was marked and significant. Whether from relief at knowing the worst, or whether he was experiencing the same reaction from the utter falsity of this last accusation that he had felt when Grant had unintentionally wronged him in his previous recollection, certain it is that some unknown reserve of strength in his own nature, of which he knew nothing before, suddenly came to his aid in this extremity. It invested him with an uncouth dignity that for the first time excited Grant's respect.