As he reached to seize it, he had a distinct premonition of misfortune. It was as if some subtle consciousness within him, knowing and remembering every detail of his past and its infinite and exact relations with his present, was warning him that to open the box was to receive knowledge that would be hateful to him. Yet he would not be cowed by such a visionary danger. He was tired out, his nerves were torn, and he was prey to his own dark imaginings. Likely enough the box was empty.
It was not, however. It contained a single photograph.
His eye leaped over it. He remembered now; he had looked at it during his former visit to the cabin, years before. It was a typical old-fashioned photograph—two men standing in stiff and awkward poses in an old-fashioned picture gallery—printed in the time-worn way. No modern photographer, however, could have caught a better likeness or made a more distinct picture. It had obviously been one of his father's possessions and had been left in the cabin.
One of the men was his own father. He had seen his photograph often enough to recognize it; besides, he remembered the man in the flesh. And he stared at the other face—a rather handsome, thin-lipped, sardonic-eyed face—as if he were looking at a ghost.
"Great God," he cried. "It's Harold Lounsbury!"
But instantly he knew it could not be Harold Lounsbury. The picture was fully twenty-five years old and the face was that of a mature man, probably aged thirty. Harold Lounsbury himself was only thirty. And now, looking closer, he saw that the features were not quite the same. There was more breeding, more sensitiveness in Harold's face. And there was also, dim and haunting, some slight resemblance to Kenly Lounsbury, whom he had brought up into Clearwater and who had gone back with Vosper.
Yet already his inner consciousness was screaming in his ear the identity of this man. Already he knew. It was no other than Rutheford, the man who later, in the cavern darkness, had struck his father down.
His deductions followed with deadly and remorseless certainty. He knew now why Harold Lounsbury had come into Clearwater. Virginia had told Bill that her lover seemed to have some definite place in view for his prospecting: he had simply come to search for the same lost mine that Bill had discovered the previous day. He knew now why Kenly Lounsbury had been willing to finance Virginia's trip into the North,—not in hopes of finding his lost nephew, but to find the mine of which he also had some knowledge and thus repair the broken remnants of his fortune. In the same sweep of realization he knew why Harold Lounsbury's face had always haunted him and filled him with hazy, uncertain memories. He had never seen Harold before; but he had seen this photograph in his own boyhood, and Harold's face had so resembled the one in the picture that it had haunted and disturbed him.
Only too well he knew the truth. Harold Lounsbury was Rutheford's son,—the son of his father's murderer. Kenly Lounsbury was Rutheford's brother. Both had come to Clearwater to repair their broken fortunes from the mine of which they both had knowledge. Whether it was guilty knowledge or not no man could tell.
Such directions as Rutheford had given his son had been unavailing because of the snowslide that had changed the contour of the little valley where the mine lay. He understood now Harold's disappointment and emotion when Bill had discovered the mine. Likely his own name was Harold Rutheford, or else Rutheford's true name had been Lounsbury. Bill stood shivering all over with rage and hate.