"You don't understand it all," I rejoined. "Everything has been done secretly, and it is only by the merest chance that I have now learned the truth. This man you have been talking to has been following me, or keeping track of me, ever since I left the penitentiary. I have seen him twice, and I took him to be a traveling salesman—as he doubtless intended I should. You can see how it was designed to work out. With a sufficient amount of discouragement it was reasonable to assume that the prison bird would finally yield to the inevitable; become a criminal in fact and get himself locked up again out of harm's way."
"You think that was the motive?"
"I am as certain of it as I should be if I could read the minds of those two old plotters in my home town. You see, I've summered and wintered them. The only thing I can't understand is why I have been so blind; why I didn't assume all this long ago and act accordingly."
"But why, why should they be so utterly lost to every sense of right and justice; to all the promptings of common humanity? It's hideously incredible!"
"I have given you two reasons, and you may take your choice. It is either the fear of death—the fear of the vengeance of a man whose life they have ruined, or else the transaction in which they involved me, and in which they made me their scapegoat, was more far-reaching than I, or anybody in Glendale, supposed it was."
Whitley sat for a full minute staring absently into the fire. Then he said, very gently: "Now that you know the truth, what will you do?"
"I know well enough what I ought to do. We may pass over the fellow at the Hamilton House; he is only a poor tool in the hands of the master workmen. I bear him no malice of the blood-letting sort. But really, Whitley, I ought to go back to Glendale and rid the earth of those two old villains who have earned their blotting-out."
Again there was a pause, and then: "Well, why don't you do it?"
I laughed rather bitterly.
"Because all the fight has been taken out of me, Whitley. That is the reason and the only reason."