Dayler’s head came up. He passed his hand across his eyes.
“How do you know all these things?” he asked again.
“Does it matter?” she answered. “They are true, aren’t they?”
“Yes, they are true.” His voice was scarcely audible.
“It was Keats who found you, not the Royal Northwest Mounted,” she continued. “Keats had long ago left the Yukon, and had settled in Chicago—a drunkard. He was an old man now, and down and out, living from hand to mouth. I do not know how he found you; I only know that after all these years he decided to make restitution, though counting no doubt on you giving him some money in return for the letter. However, be that as it may, two days ago a man brought you a sealed envelope, which he said a man named Keats, who had just died in Chicago, had confessed, as he was dying, to have stolen from you, and that Keats, as a last request, had asked that it be given back to you. You opened the envelope, and found that it contained Laynton’s letter. With this in your possession at last you were absolutely secure, even in the very improbable event of anything ever being done by the police. Why then, after twenty years, should you voluntarily open the case and disrupt the associations you had formed, and your life as you had molded it in all that time? In any event, you would consider long and carefully before taking so vital and momentous a step. I do not know what your final decision was, or even if you have come to one yet; but, pending such a decision, you—” She motioned suddenly across the table. “But first, will you please open the table drawer in front of you, Mr. Dayler.”
He obeyed her, a sort of slow wonder in his movements. The drawer, open, disclosed, among other supplies of stationery, a pile of long, manila envelopes.
She motioned again—this time to the envelopes.
“You sealed the letter up again, in one of those envelopes and put it away. And that brings us to to-night. I would like to have you show that letter to”—she indicated Billy Kane with a curt nod of her head—“this man here.”
For an instant Dayler did not move, then he stiffened back in his chair, his eyes narrowed.
“I begin to see!” His jaws snapped hard together. “So that’s what you are after! You propose to steal that paper from me, and then blackmail me with it afterwards. It is the letter that you want!”