Beckwith quite calmly cut the twine. The papers on the inside were dry, and he spread one out, looking at it with interest which sought confirmation of a conclusion already made. Wells had concealed the crime.
“Hugh Conway—” The name leaped at him from the head-lines. A shock went over Beckwith so that for a moment he could read no more. His hands were shaking. Triumph welled up in his heart. He laughed for an instant, and steadied his hands against the table before him. He fixed his eyes on the printed page.
A moment later his always frightened half-caste wife was shrinking in terror from the room she had been about to enter. Her husband was in there, staring at a sheet of paper and pouring out imprecations from the dregs of two languages. He seemed so furious that his anger verged on panic.
“Hugh Conway Announces Gift to City’s Poor!” The head-lines were those of the “feature” section of one of the larger newspapers which invariably made much of the benevolences of the rich. Below the headline a pen-and-ink portrait of Hugh Conway—Hugh Conway, whom Beckwith had killed a month before—smiled from the page.
Beckwith, with the sensation of unreality one experiences in a nightmare, read the fulsome eulogy of the dead man. But the dead man was not here described as dead. The conventional phrases of the newspaper reporter, “Mr. Conway refused to be interviewed.” “At his home it was said that Mr. Conway did not wish to add anything to the statement of his attorneys, who have completed the arrangements for the gift.” All the evasions and artifices of men who have failed to see an important man were used.
Through the mist of incredulous amazement, Beckwith could gather only one impression. Conway had not been seen. No one had looked upon his living form to write of him recently. Beckwith knew why, of course. Conway was dead. But why, why had this gift been announced as from a living man?
With trembling fingers Beckwith spread out the remainder of the papers. Here and there he saw references to the gift. A monster sum was to be expended for fresh-air outings for the children of the slums. Every reference spoke of the frequent benefactions of the man Beckwith knew was dead, but not one word or line referred to his murder.
True, there was no direct mention of a late interview with him, but on the other hand no faintest hint had escaped the editorial writers of the fact that he had been killed, and that his murderer had gone openly to a country from which he could not be extradited, where he was living in ease and comfort, defying the law to punish him.
When the last of the papers had been gone through, Beckwith was in a frenzy. He had killed Conway, and the papers would not mention it! He felt almost as if he were being cheated, as, in a way, he was. A large part of his triumph was the public knowledge of his superiority to both Conway and Wells. To be deprived of that was infuriating, daunting.
Beckwith suddenly got up and went from the house, to walk heedlessly in the pouring rain and try to think what could have happened to set his plans awry. Such few brown-skinned folk as saw him shrugged their shoulders and murmured softly to one another. Los Yanquis were mad, though el Señor Beckwith had seemed less mad than they until now. But behold him walking in the downpour!