“Let me move your stool out into the sun,” he suggested. “There’s a chill in the wind today. Of course I’ll stay, and we’ll have some more of that excellent coffee before I go. You must teach me how you make it; mine always turns out as muddy as a bucket of Missouri River water.”
His cheerfulness was like that which a healthy man displays at the bedside of a dying friend–assumed, but helpful in its way. He placed her folding canvas stool in the sun beyond the shadow of the tent and found a box for himself. Thus arranged, he waited for her to speak.
“Still, I am not sure of what I protested in regard to your friendship and respect,” said she after a little brooding silence. “I am a fraud, taken at the best, and perhaps a criminal.”
Dr. Slavens studied her face as she paused there and looked away, as if her thoughts concentrated beyond the blue hills in the west.
“My name is not Horton,” she resumed, facing him suddenly. “It is Gates, and my father is in the Federal penitentiary at Leavenworth.”
“But there was no call for you to tell me this,” he protested softly.
“Yes, every reason for it,” she averred. “The fabric of all my troubles rests on that. He was president of a bank–you remember the scandal, don’t you? It was nation-wide.”
“I spoke to you once of the ghosts of money. They have worried me for four years and more, for nothing but the ghosts are left when one loses place and consequence before the world. It was a national bank, and the charge was misapplication of funds. He had money enough for all the sane uses of any man, but the pernicious ambition to be greater assailed him, even old as he was.
“He never said, and I never have held it so, that his punishment was unjust. Only it seemed to us unfair when so many greater evildoers escape or receive pardons. You will remember, perhaps, that none of the depositors lost anything. Wild as his schemes appeared, they turned out sound enough after a while, and everything was liquidated.