“If it is, what was the use of mutilating the weekly lists? You look at them and you’ll see that they’re changed too. I tell you I believe he’s altered them himself. The colonel didn’t cut him in standing when he suspended him, and the fellow wants to take home a big report to show to his mother, and make her think he’s been at the head of the heap all the time.”
Finkelton was rummaging among the weekly lists.
“Don’t you think,” continued Brede, “that you’d better call Colonel Silsbee’s attention to the matter, anyway?”
“Well, I might,” responded Finkelton, slowly; “but I don’t know that it’s my duty to, and maybe—” He paused for a moment, recalling the somewhat strained relations existing at present between him and Brightly; then he added: “I’ve no objection to doing it, though. I believe I owe him no favors.”
“Just so,” assented Brede. “I think such a rascally and clumsy trick ought to be exposed. You might do it to-night when you go in to the office to make up the reports. I’ll go in with you as clerk if you want me to, and then I can explain how I came to detect the fraud. See?”
Finkelton nodded. He had entered unsuspectingly into a cruel plot laid by an unscrupulous schemer.
Ten minutes later, when Brede left the room, his eyes had a wicked gleam in them, and his thin lips were curled in pleasant contemplation of satisfying revenge. He himself had erased the figures. He had been guilty not only of a mean and cowardly act, but of a criminal one as well. Yet conscience did not smite him, nor fear of discovery cause him to hesitate.
Finkelton carried out to the letter the programme laid down for him by Brede. He took the captain into the office with him that evening to assist in making up the weekly report. At an opportune moment Colonel Silsbee’s attention was called to the erased and substituted figures opposite Brightly’s name and Brede very glibly related the story of his discovery.
Colonel Silsbee was much surprised and perplexed. He could not believe that Brightly had deliberately falsified the record. The lad had always been scrupulously honest. He questioned Brede and Finkelton closely, but they gave him no further information. Finally he said,—
“Brightly shall not be condemned without a hearing. Whatever his faults may have been of late, I cannot credit the fact that he has been guilty of so gross a misdemeanor as these papers would seem to indicate. We will call him in and hear what he has to say.”