The Magnate weighed the question from a score of angles. He reached and secured a second cigar. “I don’t think so,” he said with a dark frown. “I don’t think they would bother with me. I’m more or less retired. I’ve drawn out of a lot of things. Younger men are turning out the ammunition now.”
“Then which of your friends might be responsible for this letter?”
“Well put!” exclaimed Stockbridge. “Friends may be right. Friends now, or former friends who have rounded on me.”
“Name some!”
“There’s Morphy!”
“We settled him. We should never hear from him again.”
“I’m not so sure! You don’t know him like I know him. He’s a vindictive devil! He got ten to twenty years in state prison. You remember the case. He lost his appeal to the Governor, only last week. I blocked it through Tammany affiliations. You know what that fiend in stripes is capable of doing. He would sell his soul to get me!”
Drew grew serious. “Yes, I know,” he said.
“Then there is—well, there are others. Ten, at least! What man can rise in this slippery city without pushing a few down the ladder? Wall Street and Broad Street and New Street are full of curb-stone blackmailers who knew me when I was struggling with my companies. They saw me take chances they themselves feared to take. They hounded me, then. Thank God, I got above them!”
Drew leaned over the table. “A few names,” he said. “Something specific. Who of all of them would be capable of phoning the cemetery, representing himself to be your family physician and ordering the grave dug? Who might think of a thing like that?”