The new! He smiled grimly, without mirth, as, entering his room, he switched on the light, stepped quickly to his desk, pulled open a drawer, and took out his revolver. The new! There would be very little of the new! He laughed now in a low, raucous way, as he slipped the weapon into his pocket. The new! A few weeks, a few months of a prison cell, and then—— His laugh died away, and a half startled, half perplexed look settled on his face. For the first time he noticed that a letter, most obviously placed to attract his attention, lay on the center of the desk pad. Strange, he had not seen it instantly!
He stared at it now. It was a plain envelope, unstamped, and addressed to him. The writing was familiar too! Larmon's! He picked it up, opened it—and from the folds of the letter, as he drew it from the envelope, four torn pieces of paper fluttered to the desk. And for a long time, in a dazed way, he gazed at them. The letter dropped from his hand. Then mechanically he pieced the four scraps together. It was one of the leaves torn from Larmon's notebook that night in Apia—and here was the heavy scrawl where he, John Bruce, had signed with the quill toothpick. It was Larmon's copy of the bond.
And again for a long time he stared at it, then he picked up the letter again. He read it slowly, for somehow his brain seemed only able to absorb the words in a stunned way. Then he read it again:
Dear Bruce:—11 P. M.
Something has come into your life that was not there on a night you will remember in the Southern Seas, and I know of no other way to repay you for what you did for me to-day than to hand you this. I knew from what you said to-night, or, rather perhaps, from what you did not say, that this was in your heart. And if I were young again, and the love of a good woman had come to me, I too should try—and fail, I fear, where you will succeed—to play a man's part in life.
And so I bid you good-by, for when you read this I shall be on my way back West. What I lose another will gain. Amongst even my friends are men of honorable callings and wide interests who need a John Bruce. You will hear from one of them. Godspeed to you, for you are too good and clean a man to end your days as I shall end mine—a gambler.
Yours,
Gilbert Larmon.
The love of a good woman—and young again! John Bruce's face was white. A thousand conflicting emotions seemed to surge upon him. There was something fine and big in what Larmon had done, like the Larmon whose real self he had come to glimpse for the first time last night; and something that was almost ghastly in the unconscious irony that lay behind it all. And for a little while he stood there motionless, holding the letter in his hand; then with a quick, abrupt return to action, he began to tear the letter into little shreds, and from his pocket he took his own copy of the bond and tore that up, and the four pieces of Larmon's copy he tore into still smaller fragments, and gathering all these up in his hands, he walked to the window and let them flutter out into the night.
The way was clear. There was nothing to connect Gilbert Larmon with the man who to-morrow—no, to-day—would be in the hands of the police charged with murder. Nothing to bring to light Larmon's private affairs, for nothing bearing Larmon's signature had ever been kept; it was always destroyed. Larmon was safe—for, at least, they could never make John Bruce talk.