"Keep your hands off me, Alan Massey. It was the truth. Sarah Nelson did steal the child just as I told you. She gave the child to me when she was dying a few months later. I'll give my oath on that if you like."
Alan brushed his hand across his forehead, and sat down again limply in the creaking rocker.
"Oh, you are willing to believe that again now, are you?" mocked Roberts.
"I've got to, I suppose. Go on. Tell me the rest. I've got to know. Did you really make a circus brat of John Massey and did he really run away from you? That is all you told me before, you remember."
"It was all you wanted to know. Besides," the man smiled his diabolical grin again, "there was a reason for going light on the details. At the time I held you up I hadn't any more idea than you had where John Massey was, nor whether he was even alive. It was the weak spot in my armor. But you were so panic stricken at the thought of having to give up your gentleman's fortune that you never looked at the hollowness of the thing. You could have bowled over my whole scheme in a minute by being honest and telling me to bring on your cousin, John Massey. But you didn't. You were only too afraid I would bring him on before you could buy me off. I knew I could count on your being blind and rotten. I knew my man."
"Then you don't know now whether John Massey is alive or not?" Alan asked after a pause during which he let the full irony of the man's confession sink into his heart and turn there like a knife in a wound.
"That is where you're dead wrong. I do know. I made it my business to find out. It was too important to have an invulnerable shield not to patch up the discrepancy as early as possible. It took me a year to get my facts and it cost a good chink of the filthy, but I got them. I not only know that John Massey is alive but I know where he is and what he is doing. I could send for him to-morrow, and cook your goose for you forever, young man."
He pulled himself up on one elbow to peer into Alan's gloomy face.
"I may do it yet," he added. "You needn't offer me hush money. It's no good to me, as I told you. I don't want money. I only want to pass the time until the reaper comes along. You'll grant that it would be amusing to me to watch the see-saw tip once more, to see you go down and your cousin John come up."
Alan was on his feet again now, striding nervously from door to window and back again. He had wanted to know. Now he knew. He had knowledge bitter as wormwood. The man had lied before. He was not lying now.