"These look as if they had been disturbed lately. Have you been arranging this box?"
"No, sir. I've not been re-arranging the papers; but there's a man been here, the morning you went off, and said you told him he might hunt for some letters of one Wilcox; and, in fact, as the door happened to be open, I overheard you tell him so, just as you got into the coach, and I hunted them up, and he took some of 'em, as he said you said he might; but he said he would return them," said my brother, very seriously, "if you thought, when you got home, that he had taken too many."
"Did you ask him his name?" inquired old Boyd, very gravely.
"No, I didn't think of that. I supposed, by the way you spoke to him, you were old friends, and I didn't wish to question the gentleman," replied my brother, naively, with a probable cock in his eye, which might have revealed a great deal if old Boyd had seen it.
Old Boyd, with an assumed manner of great composure, said, in response,—
"I wish you had asked his name. I do remember somebody speaking to me, in my haste of getting off, about Wilcox's letters. Wonder who it was?"
"I hope he hasn't taken off the most valuable ones," replied the clerk.
"Well, I can't tell; but I fear he has," said old Boyd. "I must find out who he was. They'll remember over to the hotel, perhaps," and off he went over there; but it wasn't long before the clerk saw him on his way to Alvord's house. What transpired there then is only known to old Boyd and Floramond Alvord.
By the next day the matter was all in an able lawyer's hands, and Mr. Frederic Alvord and he had a conference with Floramond and old Boyd.
Precisely all that happened between them I do not know; but it would seem that Floramond had given the latter will into Boyd's hands, and he had been cunning enough to keep it as a terror over Floramond, who had indorsed his paper, etc., etc., besides always paying him enormous fees for legal business, which old Boyd managed to make quite considerable. Indeed, old Boyd had increased his property a great deal during the five or six years, and it is probable that he used Floramond to advantage in many ways.