"I believe that—now," said his companion, with the faintest possible emphasis upon the time-word.
Broffin marked the emphasis, and the pause that preceded it, and leaned forward to miss no word.
"Meaning that there was a time when you didn't believe it?" Raymer asked.
"Meaning that there was a time when he had me scared half to death," confessed the one who seemed always to say the confidential thing as if it were the most trivial. "Do you remember one day in the library, when you found me looking over the files of the newspapers for the story of the robbery of the Bayou State Security Bank in New Orleans?"
Raymer remembered it very well, and admitted it.
"That was the time when the dreadful idea was scaring me stiff," she went on. "You remember the story, don't you? how the president—our Mr. Galbraith here—was held up at the point of a pistol and marched to the paying teller's window, and how the robber escaped on a river steamboat and was recognized by somebody and was arrested at St. Louis?"
"Yes; I remember it all very clearly. Also I recollect how the second newspaper notice told how he escaped from the officers at St. Louis. Wasn't there something about a young woman being mixed up in it some way?"
"There was: she was the one who recognized the robber disguised as a deck-hand on the boat."
Raymer seemed to have forgotten his impatience for a renewal of the interview with the Pineboro Railroad master car builder.
"I don't seem to recall any mention of that in the newspapers," he said half-doubtfully.