“Yes; those are the papers I mean. I stole them from his desk and hid them. I was going to destroy them; but I thought sometime they might be of use and not so dangerous, and so I hid them.”
“Where did you hide them?”
“First in the attic, then in the cellar, and finally under the bricks of the hearth in the parlour.”
“It’s easy, then, to find if they’re still there.”
Ten minutes sufficed to raise the bricks and show the hiding-place—a hollow cavity which had been devised in the early days for hiding purposes—empty.
“They are gone!” she cried as she glanced into the hole.
“Yes,” said Trafford, replacing the bricks and leading her back to Wing’s library, where they were less apt to be overheard, “they’re gone. Mr. Wing found them and, realising the alarm it would be to you to know that they were found, did not tell you. It was those papers that brought about his death.”
When Mrs. Parlin was sufficiently calm, Trafford set himself to the task of extracting the details of the affair; letting her at first tell it in her own way, and later asking questions that completed the story. Condensed to the facts, it ran as follows:
Nearly twelve years before, her husband, in the course of some investigation of a land title in the Public Lands Office, came across what appeared an error in an important entry. He was on the point of calling attention to it, so that it could be corrected, when a critical examination convinced him that it was not a mere error, but a carefully made change that involved the title to timber-land that was just becoming exceedingly valuable. Acting on the hint thus given, he went to work cautiously, but determinately, and personally got together a number of documents that revealed what seemed a systematic series of forgeries, relating to immense tracts of land that were formerly public. In some cases, the title to the land itself was involved; in others, that to the stumpage only.
It was impossible to carry on these investigations without attracting attention, especially when they had gone so far as to show that in every case where the title was suspicious, the benefit accrued to the Matthewsons and to the Hunters at Millbank. Mr. Matthewson was then Governor, but he had formerly been at the head of the Public Lands Office, and his financial prosperity had appeared to date from about the time he held that position.