“Parker,” said Carfax musingly. “He will never swindle any more. Did I tell you? I read an item in the New York Times. Parker was found dead at his desk in his Broad Street office one day last week.” Then he came back to the matter in hand. “Where do you come in, in the property distribution?”
“I don’t come in; I go out. Wilmerding and Duncan can operate the mine, and I shan’t be needed. I shall go West and try for an engineering job in one of the gold camps.”
“But not before you have had your revenge upon the dynamiters?”
“No; I shall stay long enough to see that part of it through to a finish.”
“You are proving my contention very handsomely, don’t you think?” said the critic quietly; “that you are bigger in some ways and smaller in others? You are telling yourself that this generous thing you are going to do is perfectly magnanimous, and that you are merely raising the magnanimity to the nth power by conserving the ends of pure justice in the prosecution part of it, and by obliterating yourself afterward. But, really, at the bottom of it all there are two rather dismal motives. You want your revenge, and you wish to show the woman in the case that you can turn your back upon her without half trying. Isn’t that true?”
Tregarvon’s grin bordered upon the saturnine. “It’s next to impossible to resent anything you choose to say, Poictiers; that is your one little gift—to be able to flay your friends without getting yourself disliked. Let’s talk of something else. How long is Elizabeth going to stay at Judge Birrell’s?”
This time the golden youth was able to call up the cherubic smile in all its glory.
“Not very much longer now. She, too, is going West.”
“What? Elizabeth? You don’t know her as well as I do. Her ‘West’ begins and ends at the summit of the Alleghenies.”
“Nevertheless, she is planning to make the grand tour—in a private car.”