“As I had to come on to New York, I wired you that I would call here this afternoon to see you about the shares in the Anaconda group in the Cripple Creek district,” he continued, beginning to open a case which the colored boy had brought into the room. He looked now with his keen, dark eyes at Merriwell pretty much as he had looked at the room and its furnishings.
“I knew you were Merriwell as soon as I saw you. I think I should have known you, even if I had met you by chance in the street, though we have never met before. You see, I had a man in my office who once worked for you in Arizona in a minor capacity. When he found out that I was handling stocks for you, he became so interested that he gave me a complete description of your personal appearance and told so many things concerning you that I have felt for months as if we were personally acquainted. Some of this business might have been conducted by mail and wire, but I thought, as I was so near in New York, that it was a duty I owed to myself and you to run up and see you.”
There was nothing in the man’s appearance to indicate to Merriwell that he was Brandon Drood, alias Dion Santenel, his old and bitter enemy, from whose power he had escaped so short a time before, through the aid of Frank. “Fisher Stokes,” who was evidently past middle age, was almost Frenchy in appearance, with well-waxed mustache and imperial that hid the lines of his thin lips and cold, cruel mouth. His thin, straight form was encased in a dark-gray business suit. A diamond blazed on the middle finger of his left hand and another shone in his scarp-pin. The fiery gleam of the eyes had been subdued and almost banished; and, as he talked, Merriwell noticed that his voice was soft and well modulated. It held nothing of the real accents of Brandon Drood, nor of the droning tones of the pretended Hindu. In all things “Fisher Stokes” seemed to be what he professed to be, a prosperous, alert, rather self-important mining-broker of the West. And, as Mr. Merriwell had never seen the real Fisher Stokes, who was handling Western mining-shares for him, he was the more easily deceived.
“What was the name of the man?” Merriwell asked, at once interested in Drood’s statement; for, like many men who have made themselves immensely wealthy by a lucky turn of fortune, Merriwell was sometimes garrulously fond of recalling and dilating on the past and on the days of his hardships and misfortune.
“Byron Macomber.”
“Ah, yes!”
Mr. Merriwell’s face lighted.
“Macomber was one of my most trusted clerks while I was in Arizona. So he is with you now? I am afraid that I failed to reward him properly for his services to me. Tell him so, please, and that at any time if he needs aid I shall be glad to extend it.”
Santenel had taken the papers from the leathern case and placed them on the table.
Then the fiery gleam came into Santenel’s eyes—those terrible, fascinating, serpentlike eyes—and they glowed and burned, contracting and expanding their pupils, as they eagerly studied the face of Charles Conrad Merriwell.