“I kem across that idee, so to speak, on the trail. I kem across it in some letters ez was lying wide open in the brush. I picked em up and I've got 'em here.”
He slowly took the letters from his pocket with one hand, while he dragged the chair on which he was sitting beside the master. But with a quick flush of indignation Mr. Ford rose and extended his hand.
“These are MY letters, Dabney,” he said sternly, “stolen from my desk. Who has dared to do this?”
But Uncle Ben had, as if accidentally, interposed his elbow between the master and Seth's spoils.
“Then it's all right?” he returned deliberately. “I brought 'em here because I thought they might give an idee where my wife was. For them letters is in her own handwrite. You remember ez I told ez how she was a scollard.”
The master sat back in his chair white and dumb. Incredible, extraordinary, and utterly unlooked for as was this revelation, he felt instinctively that it was true.
“I couldn't read it myself—ez you know. I didn't keer to ax any one else to read it for me—you kin reckon why, too. And that's why I'm troublin' you to-night, Mr. Ford—ez a friend.”
The master with a desperate effort recovered his voice. “It is impossible. The lady who wrote those letters does not bear your name. More than that,” he added with hasty irrelevance, “she is so free that she is about to be married, as you might have read. You have made a mistake, the handwriting may be like, but it cannot be really your wife's.”
Uncle Ben shook his head slowly. “It's her'n—there's no mistake. When a man, Mr. Ford, hez studied that handwrite—havin', so to speak, knowed it on'y from the OUTSIDE—from seein' it passin' like between friends—that man's chances o' bein' mistook ain't ez great ez the man's who on'y takes in the sense of the words that might b'long to everybody. And her name not bein' the same ez mine, don't foller. Ef she got a divorce she'd take her old gal's name—the name of her fammerly. And that would seem to allow she DID get a divorce. What mowt she hev called herself when she writ this?”
The master saw his opportunity and rose to it with a chivalrous indignation, that for the moment imposed even upon himself. “I decline to answer that question,” he said angrily. “I refuse to allow the name of any woman who honors me with her confidence to be dragged into the infamous outrage that has been committed upon me and common decency. And I shall hold the thief and scoundrel—whoever he may be—answerable to myself in the absence of her natural protector.”