“And Hunter?” Charles asked in his turn.
“He can find something else to raise a dust, or he can come out into the open and fight; but he shan’t fight longer behind this woman’s petticoat. I wish we hadn’t done it at all!”
“I’d give more than I can tell,” Charles answered, giving cry to that bitterness of shame which, hidden in his heart, he dared not uncover.
“Yes,” said Henry; “to think that mother should call our act mean and cowardly! I’d rather the old papers——” Then he stopped short.
“Has it ever occurred to you that the papers may have had something to do with Wing’s death?” Charles asked.
“Hush up!” exclaimed Henry roughly. “There are some things a man shouldn’t even dare think, much less say.”
“But—by God,” Charles answered, “there are some things a man can’t help thinking and perhaps saying. I tell you, I’m not so certain I wouldn’t have shot Wing myself for the sake of getting hold of those papers!”
“And if you’re going to keep on talking this way, you might as well have done it,” Henry answered bitterly. “I wouldn’t trust myself to think such things as you’re saying.”
“But, Henry, think, just think——”
“I won’t,” the other shouted in a wild passion. “I won’t think, and I forbid you to ask me to! The man is dead and the Lord only knows into whose hands those papers have fallen. There’s only one thing I keep thinking—thinking all the time,” and his voice dropped, while he looked anxiously over his shoulder, as if he feared the very walls of his library: “and that is that it was safer to have those papers in his hands, so long as we knew that they were there, than it is to have them in the hands of somebody—we don’t know who, for a purpose, we don’t know what.”