Enoch clutched his desk and his face turned to stone. "Don't you think you went far enough with that matter before?" he asked sternly.
Ames stumbled on, doggedly. "This last trip out West I just thought I'd go down to Brown's early stamping grounds and see what kind of a reputation he had there. I was getting a little fed up on him and I thought it couldn't hurt me to have a little something on him against a rainy day, as it were. You see I never did know what this Curly Field stuff was, but it didn't take me long to run that story down, even if it was a generation old. Of course, I don't know what Curly told you, but certainly the official reports of the Field scandal never proved anything on either Brown or Fowler."
Enoch moved impatiently. But young Ames, standing rigidly before his desk exclaimed, "Just a moment longer, please, Mr. Secretary! Some of these facts you know unless Field was so obsessed with the thought of his brother's alleged wrongs that he did not mention them, but I'll state them anyhow. The mining and smelting property that caused the whole row was originally owned by an old timer named Post who struck it rich late in life, married and died soon after, leaving everything to his son, a little chap named Arthur. This is the child Field was supposed to have robbed. Little Arthur died a couple of years after Field's suicide but by that time there was nothing left of the property and no one paid any attention to the child's death. But in reading old Post's will, something piqued my curiosity. In the event of Arthur's death, the property was to go to old Post's baby nephew, Huntingdon Post."
Enoch knit his brows quickly but he did not speak and Ames went on, "Being, of course, in a suspicious state of mind, it struck me as an unusual coincidence that this child should have died, too. So I made some inquiries. It was difficult to trace the facts because there were no relatives. Old Post seemed to have been just a solitary prowler, coming from nowhere, like so many of the old timers. But finally, I found an old fellow in the back country who had known old Post. He told me that little Hunt Post, as he called him, had been killed with his father and mother in a railway accident. I asked where they got the child's name and he said the mother's name was Huntingdon. He knew her when she was a girl living alone with her father in the Kanab country, north of the Grand Canyon. He said her father died when she was ten or eleven and a family named Smith sort of brought her up and she was known as Mary Smith. But when she married, she named the boy after her father who was a raw boned, red headed man named Enoch Huntingdon."
Enoch gave Ames a long steady look and the younger man relaxed a little.
"Now," Ames went on, "knowing Brown as I do, I wonder if little Hunt Post, who, like his mother was red headed and blue eyed, was burned up in a railroad accident. Did Field speak of the child?"
Enoch pressed the desk button and Abbott came. "Give me the Field envelope, please, Abbott."
When the envelope was in his hands, Enoch tore the flap up and began to read the close written pages. When he had finished, he put the manuscript back with steady hands. "Most of the letter," he said quietly, "is taken up by the recital of Brown's shady moral career in Mexico. At the end he speaks of a Mexican woman with red hair and violet eyes who lived with Brown for some months. She left to act as nurse to little Hunt Post. Some time after the railroad accident, Curly was the unsuspected witness to a secret meeting between this Anita and Brown. The woman demanded money and Brown demanded proof that little Hunt was dead. The conference ended only when Anita produced a box containing the child's body. Curly did not know how much Brown paid her or where she went."
Ames gave an ugly laugh. "Hoist with his own petard! Think of him starting me after the Luigi scandal!"
"Tell Abbott what you've just told me," said Enoch.