“You’re joking me, sir,” the other managed to articulate.
“I spoke to you seriously.”
The clerk recoiled from him.
“You don’t mean to say you don’t know?” he questioned, his question in itself the answer.
“I want to know.”
“Why, he’s—” John broke off and looked about him helplessly. “Hadn’t you better ask somebody else? Everybody thought you knew. We always thought . . . ”
“Yes, go ahead.”
“We always thought that that was why you had it in for him.”
Photographs and miniatures of Isaac Ford were trooping through his son’s brain, and ghosts of Isaac Ford seemed in the air about hint “I wish you good night, sir,” he could hear the clerk saying, and he saw him beginning to limp away.
“John,” he called abruptly.