"Don't want to be sociable, eh? All right. Where are you bound?"
"That is my business."
"Humph!" Frederic Vernon stared at him for a moment. Then he walked on without further words. But at the corner he looked back and saw Robert enter the telegraph office.
"Something is in the wind," he muttered to himself, and retraced his steps. Getting behind several other people, he drew close to the youth and saw him send the message and pay a good round price for it.
"That message is going to Chicago, and I know it," he told himself, after following Robert to the road once more. "Now what did it contain? Has my aunt got wind of that forged check already? If so, I must act quickly, or my cake will be dough. Whatever comes, she must never live to alter her will."
All that night he brooded over the way matters had turned. He felt that he would be made a beggar did his aunt discover the forgery. But so far the only will she had made was in his favor. She must not be allowed to make another.
"I must watch her closely," he told himself. "She frequently goes out driving, and along the cliff back of the town, too. What if some day her team took fright and went over the cliff? I don't believe she would ever live to tell the tale, and the fortune would be mine!"
If Frederic Vernon was bitter against his aunt, he was also bitter against Robert, for he now knew that our hero had exposed the plot to get Mrs. Vernon into an insane asylum.
"He goes driving with her," thought the desperate man. "They can both go over the cliff together!"