He had died in his greatest venture. The whole expedition had perished on one of the wind-swept plateaus of the Antarctic. It was Dercum who had gone in to find him, and he had found him frozen to death—the very dogs frozen, in one of those fearful depressions of temperature that sometimes descend in an immense blizzard on this wind-swept plateau.
From Dercum’s report he had very nearly reached Rexford alive. The expedition had evidently held out for days against the blizzard. The Earl of Rexford had been the last man to go. In the snow hut, on the canvas table, was his diary, written up. Beside it, on the blank sheet, were a dozen paragraphs in which he had directed the appointment of Dercum as guardian for his minor daughter, with all custody and direction of his estate.
The Secret Service agent passed these things through his mind as he descended—the brilliant laughter, the murmur of voices below, making a swirl of noises. He remembered some of the details arising in the formal matter of Dercum’s appointment after his return. A solicitor or some official authority had ventured a doubt about the handwriting on the page beside the last entry in the diary. But it was shown to him that the writing of innumerable pages of the diary varied, due to the cold or to the physical condition of the writer at the time.
The persons in Dercum’s expedition, persons whose integrity could not be doubted, had been but a few minutes behind him in entering this snow hut in which the Earl of Rexford had been found, and they had at once, at Dercum’s direction, written their signatures at the bottom of the page.
The diary had been immediately authenticated. It could not have been afterward changed. And it was shown that these signatures, written in that immense cold by benumbed fingers, varied from the normal signatures of the individuals returning to their common environment of life. In fact, no one could have said who had written these signatures if the men who had written them that day, at Dercum’s direction, in the snow hut on the canvas table, had not been present in England to establish the fact. The diary, the ink, the pen were there on the canvas table, and these men had established by their signatures the authenticity of this writing beyond question.
At this moment a tall man wearing a distinguished order passed the Chief of the American Secret Service.
“Sir,” he said, “are you perhaps receiving an inspiration from heaven on our Hyde Park murders?”
Walker smiled.
“It would be my only hope,” he said, “against the superior intelligence of Scotland Yard.”
And he went on. He was annoyed by the incident. Would he never escape from this ridiculous pretension!