"For you, Señor Frank, I am glad," declared the Mexican boy. "He did hate you with terrible hatred, and he would have ruined you. The work of it he had begun."
"Yes, the snake! I heard his boast that he was the reincarnated spirit of Porfias del Norte, whom he would avenge. The man talked like a maniac, for at the last moment he even asserted that he was Del Norte himself."
"For you it is good he did not escape," said Felipe.
"Had he escaped from the fire, the detectives would have nabbed him. The confession we overheard him make was enough to give him a good, long time behind the bars, for he boasted that, in his plot to ruin my plans, he poisoned Watson Scott and bribed Warren Hatch's automobile driver to wreck the machine in hopes of killing Hatch. Sudbury Bragg would have fallen next. That Scott stands a chance of recovering comes wholly through his remarkable stamina and fine physical condition. That Hatch was not killed is a marvel. Alvarez Lazaro was a human fiend, for, in order to injure me, he was willing to murder innocent men—he even attempted to murder two of them."
"Even I of him was afraid," confessed the Mexican boy. "It is not my way to strike the innocent in order to reach the guilty."
"I believe you, Felipe. You did not even wish to strike me if you could frighten me into giving you what you thought to be your just due. I learned that the night you stole into the room where I slept at the home of Warren Hatch and tried to shake my nerve by pressing your knife against my throat."
"But nothing could frighten you," said Felipe. "You told me then I would not kill. I am glad now that I did not. I shall never cease to be glad."
"Not even when Bantry Hagan again finds an opportunity to talk to you? Hagan is slick, and he has a seductive tongue."
"Thanks for the compliment, me boy," said a voice at the door, and a stout, florid man stepped heavily into the room.
"Señor Hagan!" cried Felipe.