The Lone Wolf Returns

by Louis Joseph Vance

"In effect, monsieur has a great deal in common with humanity," Lanyard observed with a straight face. "It would be interesting, none the less, to learn where he draws the line between the serious and the trivial."

"I guess you won't want to argue that point when you realize the proposition I've laid out for you tonight is one of the biggest contracts you ever tackled."

With a quiet smile in eyes that cast back across a gulf of years, Lanyard pronounced: "I wonder . . ."

"Oh, I know you were a hell-bender in your prime!" Morphew contended—"but when all returns are in you'll be ready to admit you never went up against anything bigger than this."

Did the ulterior thought faintly re-echo in that assertion? With a finesse of which no man was more truly master Lanyard continued to seem astray in by-paths of diverting retrospection while in reality concentrating keenly critical scrutiny upon Morphew's countenance.

Such pure malevolence as glimpsed in those lightless eyes, in spite of every artifice of hooded lids and webbing wrinkles, was hardly to be taken as the work of a thwarted will to dominate or of mortified egotism merely, but must have been the distillation of an even stronger passion, fear or . . .

"The haul you made of Folly's emeralds that night you were pie-eyed, was a wonder, or would have been if you hadn't lost your nerve; and some of the tricks you've turned since then have been pippins; but tonight's going to make history. You listen to me . . ."

But Lanyard didn't, he heard only a rumour of words whose sense made no impression upon faculties staggered by a thunderstoke of intelligence. The very elaboration of carelessness with which he had named Folly McFee had betrayed Morphew's guarded secret: brute jealousy was the fundamental cause of the hatred in which he held Lanyard, the blind insensate jealousy of an aging man who foresees the failure of his efforts to find in love of woman fuel for waning fires.

Sensitive as he must have been, with that abnormal and abominable sensitiveness from which men of his coarse fiber too often suffer, to the aversion which his caresses could not but excite, to her instinctive shrinking from even the greed of his regard, and conceiving her to entertain a tenderness for the more personable man, the more dashing figure that was clothed as well in the glamour of a wildly romantic history, and the man who most intolerably was his junior by many years, Morphew—the conjecture gained force of verified conviction in the light of this late disclosure—had decided upon Lanyard's death as the one sure means of healing Folly of her infatuation, and had decreed that it should be brought to pass as an act of justice, approved by custom and the law, meted out to Lanyard while he was engaged in the commission of a felony.

Thus at a stroke he would rid himself of one whom he hated and feared as both a rival in love and an irreconcilable menace to his more material fortunes, prove to Folly she had misplaced her admiration, and clear Hugh Morphew of all suspicion of complicity in that old offense of Mallison and the emeralds; he would even rehabilitate Mallison, if he had any further use for that one, if his indignation on account of Mallison's imputed ingratitude had not been all a blind.