That statement nigh took my breath away!
Mrs. Kingsley going as suppliant to my uncle Deck? Judge Zebulon Kingsley requesting her to do it? I shut my eyes and could picture her—frail, pale, aristocratic. The exigency must be desperate when Judge Kingsley would submit his wife to such employment.
“But please keep that a secret,” she pleaded.
I saw that I was headed into something which was bigger and more baleful than I had dreamed of. And more than before did I feel my deficiencies as a fraud who could not even turn a trick for his own wants, let alone those greater affairs in Levant.
“This mystery in our home is killing us all,” she went on. “There have been strangers in town and they have been much with my father. I do not like their looks. He would not tell us, but I am afraid they have coaxed him away to the city on this trip he is making. Perhaps your uncle has set those men on to harm him.”
I had never gauged my uncle Deck as a hirer of assassins, but I had not seen him for some years, and I admitted to myself that there was never any telling where a man’s grudge would lead him.
“Mother and I tried to make him stay at home. But he would not stay and he would not tell us why he was going to the city. Oh, how I hate those strangers, for I believe they have coaxed him away.”
I looked sideways at her, and a little shiver tingled in me. There was real venom in her tone and I saw that I had not guessed the depths in Miss Celene Kingsley.
“I wish I had a brother,” she mourned. “I believe he would feel as I feel now, and would follow up and kill the man who would harm my father.”
It was so strange an utterance from a girl and seemed so contrary to what I had supposed her nature to be that I remembered that outburst for a long time.