“You can do nothing; there is no proof,” he said, with firm assurance.
“There is Dupont,” answered Lygon, doggedly.
“Who is Dupont?”
“The French Canadian who helped me—I divided with him.”
“You said the man who helped you died. You wrote that to me. I suppose you are lying now.”
Henderley coolly straightened the notes on the table, smoothing out the wrinkles, arranging them according to their denominations with an apparently interested eye; yet he was vigilantly watching the outcast before him. To yield to blackmail would be fatal; not to yield to it—he could not see his way. He had long ago forgotten the fire and blood and shame. No Whisperer reminded him of that black page in the history of his life; he had been immune of conscience. He could not understand this man before him. It was as bad a case of human degradation as ever he had seen—he remembered the stalwart, if dissipated, ranchman who had acted on his instigation. He knew now that he had made a foolish blunder then, that the scheme had been one of his failures; but he had never looked on it as with eyes reproving crime. As a hundred thoughts tending toward the solution of the problem by which he was faced flashed through his mind, and he rejected them all, he repeated mechanically the phrase “I suppose you are lying now.”
“Dupont is here—not a mile away,” was the reply. “He will give proof. He would go to jail or to the gallows to put you there, if you do not pay. He is a devil—Dupont.”
Still the great man could not see his way out. He must temporize for a little longer, for rashness might bring scandal or noise; and near by was his daughter, the apple of his eye.
“What do you want? How much did you figure you could get out of me, if I let you bleed me?” he asked, sneeringly and coolly. “Come now, how much?”
Lygon, in whom a blind hatred of the man still raged, was about to reply, when he heard a voice calling, “Daddy, Daddy!”