The stubbly gray hair seemed almost to stand erect on his head with horror as his guest replied:
“Doctor Ludington’s corpse did not roll into the river, as you supposed, but into your back yard, and the shock of the fall restored him to life from the trance in which he must have been lying. So you and your kind-hearted wife nursed the villain back to health, and then it was no wonder he was afraid for any one to find him out!”
The homely pair were incredulous at first, but little by little he brought them to believe in his theory, and then they were enraged to think how they had been imposed upon by a Ludington.
In this mood he found it easy to persuade the man to lodge his information with the authorities, adding himself the facts of Doctor Ludington’s residence at Weston as Doctor Rupert.
But he took care to impress on them that he did not care to be mentioned in the case at all. He had no personal interest in it. He had only been interested in the story, and struck by the coincidence, so that he had worked out the truth for himself. He would not even divulge his name, but he made sure before he left that the officers were en route to Weston to arrest the suspected Doctor Rupert.
CHAPTER XXIII.
THE TRUTH AT LAST.
“What mystery is here?” cried a man’s voice sharply, with a note of subtle pain.
It was the man who had paid Eva’s fare that morning she went to Clarksburg—the handsome New Yorker, who had refused her his name, but whom we know already was her own father, Clyde Somerville, of New York.
He was sitting in the office of a Parkersburg hotel reading the Sentinel just a few days after the arrest and imprisonment of Doctor Ludington.