“There’s a nice pair of names for a tangle,” commented Murray as the possibilities of the situation began to dawn on him. “No wonder my inquiries failed to untangle it. Would you mind telling me how you happened to try this thing?”
“No trouble at all,” returned Harkness. “It was my cousin’s scheme. He had tried to get insurance when he was living on Wabash Avenue and had failed. He had a heart trouble that was likely to culminate fatally almost any time. Still, I don’t think it occurred to him to try to beat an insurance company until we happened to be thrown together about a year ago. We were cousins, although we never had met before, and the similarity of names seemed to make a great impression on him. He had just returned to Chicago after a year or more in St. Louis, and he already had had one heart attack, with a warning from his doctor that the next would almost certainly be fatal. He was also told that the next was not likely to be long delayed. Now, I suppose you’ll think I’m lying, but I did not take kindly to his scheme, and the money alone would not have tempted me to go into it. I was sorry for his wife. He had been able to make only a bare living; he could leave her absolutely nothing. She never had had to support herself and there seemed to be mighty little chance that she could do it. I finally agreed to go into it for her sake. It looked easy and I was glad to make the try on her account.”
“But you wouldn’t refuse a little something for yourself on the side, so to speak,” suggested Murray sarcastically.
“No, I wouldn’t,” Harkness frankly admitted. “To carry out the plan it would be necessary for me to give up my job, change my name and make a fresh start somewhere else. The job was not such an all-fired good one, but it might be some time before I got another as good, and I would need something for expenses while I was losing myself. I was to get five hundred of the three thousand dollars insurance. The rest was to go to the widow.”
“That wouldn’t last her very long,” remarked Murray.
“It would help a little,” said Harkness, “and we thought we would stand a better chance if we didn’t ask for too big a sum.”
“An insurance company,” said Murray, “has to be as particular with a small risk as with a large one, and it will follow up a suspicious case as closely in one instance as in the other. It’s a matter of principle.”
“I think I understand that now,” remarked Harkness regretfully.
“But I am curious to know,” persisted Murray, “how in the world you arranged such a mystifying record.”
“It was easy,” replied Harkness. “I gave you my cousin’s place and date of birth, his parents, his marriage and his life up to the time he left Madison. Then I gave you my record up to the finish, with the exception of one year, when he was in the Chicago directory. We put that year in so you could get trace of the wife in case you made any investigation. I have no wife, and it was rather important, of course, that there should be a record of a wife somewhere.”