"H'm. It has been handed in to me two or three times lately that the old man is out gunning for Van Bruce or for me. Any truth in that?"
"I think not. Massingale is a Kentuckian, and I fancy he is quite capable of potting either one or both of you for the attack on his son. But so far he has done nothing—has hardly left Steve's bedside."
Mr. J. Wesley Cortwright flung himself back in his luxurious swing chair and clasped his pudgy hands over the top of his head where the reddish-gray hair was thinning reluctantly.
"I've been putting it off to see which way the cat was going to jump," he admitted. "If young Massingale is out of danger, it is time to get action. What was the quarrel about, between him and Van Bruce?"
"Why do you ask me?" queried Brouillard.
"Because you are pretty thick with the Massingales, and you probably know," was the blunt accounting for the question.
"It occurs to me that your son would be a better source of information," said Brouillard, still evading.
"Van Bruce has told me all he remembers—which isn't much, owing to his own beastly condition at the time. He says young Massingale was threatening something—something in connection with the Coronida Grant—and that he got the insane idea into his head that the only way to stop the threat was by killing Massingale."
The sandy-gray eyes of the millionaire promoter were shifting while he spoke, but Brouillard fixed and held them before he said: "Why should Massingale threaten your son, Mr. Cortwright?"
"I don't know," denied the promoter, and he said it without flinching a hair's-breadth.