"Maybe that interests you some. Maybe it gets you. It won't for long. He'll crawl out of it and lie out of it and talk you and buy you back to him. Well, I know one thing more, and he can't lie or crawl out of it. My father could have put him behind bars any time in twenty years. He's a common thief.
"It was when he was seventeen, and studying law first, back in a town up state that's not on the map or likely to get there, and he was called by a name there that wasn't Everard. He was seventeen, but he was the same then as now; he had the same will to get on and the power to, no matter who he trampled on to get there, and the same charm that got men and women both, though they didn't trust him—got them even when he was trampling on them and they knew it. It got him into trouble there with two girls at once. One was the girl that gave him his start, the chance to go into her uncle's office. He was the biggest man in the town. Older than Everard, this girl was, and teaching in the school he went to, when she fell in love with him and brought him home to her town and gave him his chance. He was tired of her, and she was where it was bound to come out soon how things were with them, and so was the other girl, a girl that he wasn't tired of, the daughter of the woman where he boarded. He tried to get her to go away with him. She wouldn't go and she wouldn't forgive him, but the town was getting too hot for him, and he had to go.
"He had to go quick and make a clean getaway and he wanted a real start this time. He had to have money. That was a dead little town. There was only one place he could get money enough, in the little hotel there. It was the only bank they had. The keeper of it used to cash checks and make loans. Everard was lucky, the same then as now. There was almost five thousand dollars in the safe in the hotel office the night he broke into it, and that was enough for him. He had a fight with the hotel clerk, but he got away with the money, and he got away from the town.
"The clerk was his best friend in town—never trusted him, but fell for him the same as the girls and lent him money and listened to his troubles—and fell for him again when he ran across him again, years later, here in Green River. Everard told him he'd sent the money back, and he kept the secret. He never took hush money for it like Charlie. He said Everard ought to have his chance, and was straight now. But he fell for Everard again, that's what happened. Everard had him, the same as the rest of you.
"The clerk was my father."
The boy's voice broke off. There was dead silence in the hall. Green River had been listening almost in silence, and did not break it now. Presently the boy sighed, shrugged his thin shoulders as if they were throwing off an actual weight, and spoke again, this time in a lifeless voice, with all the colour and drama wiped out of it, a voice that was very tired.
"That's all," he said. "That's back of him, with his fine airs and his far-reaching schemes and his big name in the state. You've stood for a crook. Will you stand for a common criminal, a common thief? Now you know and it's up to you. That's all."
An hour later a boy was hurrying through the dark along the road to the Falls.
He was almost home. Green River lay far behind with its scattered, sparsely strewn lights. The flat fields around him and the unshaded road before him, so bleak by day, were beautiful to-night, far reaching and mysterious. Above them, flat looking and unreal, remote in a coldly clouded sky, hung the yellow September moon.