I was watching Alison. Her hands were tightly clasped in her lap, and she was staring out of the window at the cheerless roof below. She had set her lips a little, but that was all.
“You understand, of course, that I’m not defending myself,” went on the sullen voice. “The day came when old Harrington put us both out of the house at the point of a revolver, and I threatened—I suppose you know that, too—I threatened to kill him.
“My sister and I had hard times after that. We lived on the continent for a while. I was at Monte Carlo and she was in Italy. She met a young lady there, the granddaughter of a steel manufacturer and an heiress, and she sent for me. When I got to Rome the girl was gone. Last winter I was all in—social secretary to an Englishman, a wholesale grocer with a new title, but we had a row, and I came home. I went out to the Heaton boys’ ranch in Wyoming, and met Bronson there. He lent me money, and I’ve been doing his dirty work ever since.”
Sullivan got up then and walked slowly forward and back as he talked, his eyes on the faded pattern of the office rug.
“If you want to live in hell,” he said savagely, “put yourself in another man’s power. Bronson got into trouble, forging John Gilmore’s name to those notes, and in some way he learned that a man was bringing the papers back to Washington on the Flier. He even learned the number of his berth, and the night before the wreck, just as I was boarding the train, I got a telegram.”
Hotchkiss stepped forward once more importantly. “Which read, I think: ‘Man with papers in lower ten, car seven. Get them.’”
Sullivan looked at the little man with sulky blue eyes.
“It was something like that, anyhow. But it was a nasty business, and it made matters worse that he didn’t care that a telegram which must pass through a half dozen hands was more or less incriminating to me.
“Then, to add to the unpleasantness of my position, just after we boarded the train—I was accompanying my sister and this young lady, Miss West—a woman touched me on the sleeve, and I turned to face—my wife!
“That took away my last bit of nerve. I told my sister, and you can understand she was in a bad way, too. We knew what it meant. Ida had heard that I was going—”