But the very violence of his mood presently induced the beginning of reaction. He remembered who it was that he was riding so fast to expose and strike down. “Aleck! Aleck Bancroft!” he murmured, and slowed the mare’s racing feet. The tenderness and loyalty of friendship raised still, small voices in his heart. Once again the thing staggered him. It seemed incredible. In the depths of his heart was conviction that José Gonzalez had told him the truth. But could he go to his best friend with such a charge, to taunt, insult, and challenge to death, on the word of a Mexican assassin? The idea repelled him. And he was glad of the misgiving, unwilling to believe that the quest he had followed with such eager determination was leading him to the door of Alexander Bancroft. “I ought—I ought to have confirmation, I suppose,” he said to himself, uncertainly. And so, still undecided, feeling that it was truth and yet unwilling to believe, he came to the gate of his own corral. After he had unsaddled and stabled Brown Betty, he went through the kitchen for a drink of water from the big olla, wrapped in a wet coffee sack, that stood always in the drying wind and the shade of a tree beside the door.
Mrs. Peters came in from the store-room with a panful of potatoes. “Hank had to go to White Rock this morning,” she said, “and he brought some mail for you. It’s on your desk.”
Conrad passed through the series of rooms, opening one out of another, to the front. On his desk lay some papers and a single letter. “Littleton!” he exclaimed as he hastily tore it open. He read:
“My dear Curt:—I have at last got for you the information we’ve been searching for so long.”
His eyes eagerly rushed over the next few lines.
“I have satisfied myself that the man we’ve been trailing all these years is Alexander Bancroft, a banker and prominent man in New Mexico, who lives at Golden,—is that place anywhere near you?—and for a number of years has been considered one of the most solid, upright, and influential citizens of your Territory.”
The letter dropped from Curtis’s fingers and his heart gave a great thump that sent the blood in a crimson wave over his face. “My God, then, it’s true!” he said aloud, and sat for a moment gazing at the letter in the same stupefied way he had looked after Gonzalez’s retreating figure. A grim smile twisted the corners of his mouth as he read on.
“You may know him. Delafield’s history as we’ve got it now makes his case one of those curious romances of detective work whose equal could hardly be found in fiction. We missed long ago the clew that would have led us to success, in those gaps in his trail we never tried to fill, because we came upon his tracks again so easily a little later. While working on another case recently I had occasion to look through an omnibus bill passed years ago by an Arizona legislature. It contained an astonishing ruck of things, and among them was a section authorizing William J. Brown to change his name to Alexander Bancroft. I knew that William J. Brown was one of the names under which Delafield had once traded in mines down there, and that, when we next found him after he had dropped that name, it was as John Smith, when he went down into old Mexico with John Mason Hardy. This name of Bancroft, sandwiched in there, and with such pains to legalize it, when we had found no track of it elsewhere, made me prick up my ears. I looked deeper into the matter and found that he had used this name of Bancroft only when he went to visit his wife and daughter, who lived most of the time in San Francisco or Denver, and were known by that name. When last we had track of the man, before I ran across Rutherford Jenkins, it was, you will remember, as Henry C. Williams, and then we lost all trace of him. That was because he went then on a visit to his wife and daughter in Denver and stayed there for some months. He had made a good clean-up about that time and increased it by some lucky trading on the Denver stock exchange. Then he went to New Mexico, kept the name of Bancroft, engaged in other business as well as mining, and settled down to be a permanent citizen.
“I congratulate you upon the successful termination of our long chase. I understand Bancroft is a man of considerable property and I hope you will be able to make him disgorge some of the goods he stole so long ago. I have written this much hurriedly, just to give you an outline of my discoveries at once. But I have all the necessary proofs, and whenever you want to bring the case to trial they are at your service.”