"Yes."
He handed the precious papers to me and then sat down.
Oh, how eagerly I grasped the envelope! How much of importance it might contain for me!
There were three letters and four legal papers. Like Nicholas Weaver's statement, all were badly written, and I had a hard job to decipher even a portion of the manuscript.
Yet I made out enough to learn that Aaron Woodward was the forger of the notes and checks that had sent my father to prison, and that the death of a relative in Chicago was only a pretence. The work had been done in Brooklyn through that branch of Holland & Mack's establishment. Chris Holtzmann had helped in the scheme, and John Stumpy had presented one of the checks, for which service he had received six hundred dollars. This much was clear to me. But two other points still remained dark.
One was of a certain Ferguson connected with the scheme, who seemed to be intimate with my father. He was probably the man my father had mentioned when we had visited him at the prison. His connection with the affair was far from clear.
The other dark point in the case was concerning Agatha Mitts, of 648 Vannack Avenue, Brooklyn. She was a boarding-mistress, and the three or four men had stopped at her house. But how much she knew of their doings I could not tell.
"Well, what do you think?" muttered Sammy Simpson. "Mighty important, I'll be bound."
"Not so very important," I returned, as coolly as I could. "They will be if I can get hold of other papers to use with them."
"Exactly, sir; just as I always said. Well, you can get them easily enough, no doubt."