“No such luck, he has started a suit against Alice to recover those certificates.”
“How did you hear?”
“His lawyer came to me to get Alice’s address. And what do you think? Dick Harding told me this morning that Gassett tried to get him to take the case. Foxy, wasn’t it? Dick declined promptly.”
“Alice would do well to get Dick for her lawyer.”
“I imagine Uncle Joseph will attend to that.”
“Still, I think I’ll drop her a hint.”
But Alice had evidently not forgotten Dick Harding or Dr. Morton’s remark about his being a good lawyer. Before the doctor’s letter could reach her, a formal missive from Uncle Joseph requested Dick Harding to defend Alice’s side and to get an older lawyer to help him.
Dick went promptly to work. Dr. Morton sent down the box of letters and papers Alice had left in his charge and Dick went over them carefully, but did not find what he was hoping for.
“It is a queer mix-up,” he wrote Alice. “I cannot understand why there isn’t a scrap of writing anywhere from Mr. Gassett to your father. There surely must have been some correspondence between them on business matters. Many things in your father’s letters to your mother show this—but the letters are missing. It hardly seems likely your father would have destroyed them all. Do you suppose that he could have left them at the store and that they have fallen into Gassett’s hands, too? Or could your mother have accidentally destroyed them? I remember though you said she was most careful to keep old letters. I have a queer feeling about all this—that the missing letters and papers still exist and will turn up yet. But feelings don’t go in law courts. Is there an attic to the old house or any secret closet where they could possibly have been concealed?”
Alice talked the matter over with Uncle Joseph and he started rummaging among his papers to see if he could find anything in her father’s old letters that would help. There were few references to business matters in these and no reference to Mr. Gassett except a mere mention of the fact that he had gone into partnership with him.