"I don't know; he comes and goes pretty much as he pleases when I'm not in town."
"Do you know anything about him personally?"
"No."
"I do. His father was a bank cashier, and he became a defaulter—of the easy-mark kind; the kind that is too good-natured to look too curiously at a friend's collateral. He would have gone over the road if your father hadn't pulled him out by main strength."
"I see," said Blount cynically. "And the son has paid his father's debt to my father. But why the safe-blowing?"
"Collins's face had to be saved in some way. He couldn't know that you meant to lock the dummy up in the safety vault," returned Gantry, and then, after a pause: "That's our one little ray of hope, Evan."
"I don't see it."
"Don't you? Then I'll make it a bit plainer. If some railroad burglar had cracked your safe, you could confidently assume that the original letters have been carefully cremated by this time, couldn't you?"
"I suppose so."
"But if your father has them ... Evan, I don't know any more than the man in the moon what he wants them for, but the man in the street would grin and tell you that your father was merely getting ready to hold the railroad company up for something it didn't want to part with."