“A credit to his stock!” mocked Obed. “That’s your usual mild way o’ puttin’ it. She’ll take the man’s part, more or less, till she dies, boys, mark my words! Well, the very week after he and his party landed here, that afternoon, there came a big noise about a robbery of a bank in New York, that all the papers was full of; an’ the parties that managed it planned the hull affair in a yacht they’d hired, an’ they’d expected to get off safe in it when the thing was over. ’Twas a little before your day, Mr. Philip—the Suburban Bank robbery at a place close to New York—”
The Suburban Bank robbery! Touchtone caught his breath excitedly. Gerald nearly betrayed his friend by his unguarded look at Philip. But it was dark now, and the storm was boisterous. Obed pursued his tale, unobserving and quite forgetful of any names that he might have read long ago. “Mr. Clagg said that the description given durin’ the trial of those bank-scamps fitted some of Mr. Jennison’s friends ashore that day to a T. I’d taken some good looks at ’em from behind my salt haystacks. Well, after that, wife, here, she kind o’ give up about Mr. Jennison. You felt terrible bad, didn’t you?”
“Yes, I did,” Loreta assented, soberly, “though we couldn’t never make up our minds that he was actually any nearer mixed up in the thing. You’d ought to say that,” she added.
“You’ve said it for me,” Obed returned. “That’s enough.”
His regret and shame at such disgrace to the blood of the Jennisons was as strong as his wife’s, slightly as he expressed it. He continued his story rapidly:
“Well, the very week the bank was broken into he arrived here one mornin’ suddenly, an’ he stayed here a couple o’ days. We remembered that later, in the trial; an’ from here he went off to Canada. Next thing Mr. Clagg knew he’d given up all his law business, whatever it amounted to, an’ was doing something, or nothing, in New York again. We scarcely saw him after that. He’s come less and less often, as wife may have told you—once a year, once in two years. He was last over here in the spring. An’ now I come to what Clagg was a-letting on to me the other day, Loreta.”
“I hope, I hope, Obed, that it’s nothing worse than what’s come already?” interrupted Mrs. Probasco.
In spite of any new and unexpected interest in Obed’s account of the black sheep of the Jennison line, Philip felt a touch of sympathy for her kindly grief.
“No, it aint so bad. Yet, it’s a trifle wuss, in one way,” Obed answered, philosophically. “There’s more ways o’ earnin’ a dishonest livin’ than there is for an honest one, I sometimes think. But give me, please, a square an’ fair villain! Clagg says that last year there was a bad case, a most amazin’ one, of blackmail in New York. Do you know what that is, wife? These boys do, I reckon. Well, this was a special, scandalous thing, so Mr. Clagg thinks; an attempt on the part of a couple of rascals to put a family secret into all the newspapers unless the two old ladies they threatened would pay ’em well on to twenty-five thousand dollars to keep quiet. They didn’t succeed. The police took the matter up. The rogues were frightened an’ got out of town as quick as they could, and they haint been heard of since. Clagg says he knows to a certainty that Winthrop Jennison was one of ’em! So that’s his last piece of wickedness, and he’s sunk low enough for that!”
“Clagg may be wrong,” replied Mrs. Probasco, sadly.