'My dear,' he proclaimed, with unusual emphasis, 'it requires a clever man to deceive me. Besides, I am very careful. I booked the man's passage. I saw him off. He was aboard when the ship was in mid-ocean. The wireless telegraph told me that with ease and certainty. No, let us have no doubts. Dao Chang does not require money alone to tempt him to China. He willingly risks his head to get even with the coolie who betrayed him, as also to work his revenge on the mandarin who was the actual cause of his downfall. Besides there is another reason. If he could earn the money I have promised, he could buy evidence to clear his name with the greatest certainty. He could even buy a position of some power, and of greater affluence. In fact, he could reinstate himself. There is his object.'
'But——'
'You cannot see farther. Quite so,' said this soft-spoken ruffian. 'I will proceed at once. Chang sailed promptly so as to land in China before the party to which David is attached. He will enter himself as one of their servants. Then he will earn his reward from us by taking possession of the will should they happen to find it. If not, he himself will make search for it on his own account. Should that happen he will have done with your stepson and his friends, though I suspect that he will relieve them of any valuables. He will send us the document so that we may destroy it, and will then be free to carry out his own business. Our affair first, you understand, his own afterwards.'
It was a crafty piece of scheming when all things were considered, and looking at the matter from Ebenezer's point of view there was no reason at all why he should not be eminently satisfied. For fortune seemed to have played fairly with him. The very ruffian who had instigated the murder of Edward Harbor had offered his services; and it was this Chinaman's direct interest to find the will for which David was journeying to the country of the Celestials. It was not as if the man had been asked to discover a jewel of vast value. For then one might easily have suspected his honesty and good intentions. Here only a document was in question, a piece of parchment, perhaps, with a few written lines upon it, valueless to all but our hero and the two schemers who should have been father and mother to him. Valueless in any case to Chang, the ruffianly Chinaman, so useless, in fact, that he would be eager to change it for the thousand pounds so readily offered by Ebenezer. Undoubtedly, the man who had married David's stepmother was delighted, and by the time he had finished his narrative, so also was Mrs. Clayhill.
'It is all wonderful and most fortunate. I can sleep in peace,' she ventured, 'for I know that no violence will be offered.'
She departed from the room in high feather, while hardly had the door closed when her husband smiled broadly, and in a most suggestive manner.'
'Clever woman,' he told himself. 'Precious clever; but I have to remember that she is a woman, with natural distaste of murders and sudden attacks. Glad I didn't tell her all that Chang hinted. What luck to be sure to have dropped on the fellow. You could have knocked me down with a hat pin when I received his letter.'
Perhaps it was as well that Ebenezer had not told his wife all the story; for there were parts of it to which that lady would most certainly have taken exception. As Ebenezer had remarked, Chang had hinted many things, and had, in fact, spoken openly.
'You leave it to me to stop this English boy, then?' he had asked, prior to his departure on the boat. 'If, for instance, I could send certain news that he was killed or drowned, or something of that sort, that would be sufficient?'
'I will pay a thousand pounds for that will with pleasure,' Ebenezer answered promptly. 'Of course, should this young fellow come by an accident, and his death be sworn to by a British Consul, then the money would be paid with equal pleasure.'