“Are you sure we’ll not be heard here?” he asked, cunning returning to his eyes.
“Perfectly,” was the answer. “My servants are well trained, and these walls are much thicker than those they put into the houses they build nowadays. You can talk openly and freely, Stone, and your secrets will be guarded.”
Stone nodded, and the glitter in his eyes became more pronounced.
“You are right, Doctor Follansbee,” he said. “I can’t figure out how you know, but I want to get rid of Win Crawford. I—I want to get rid of him before he gets rid of me.”
His heavy face was wrinkled into a mask of cunning—the foolish, vacant cunning of the insane.
“He thinks he’s clever,” Stone went on; “thinks I don’t know what he’s going to do. But I’m as cute as he is, and I’ve tumbled to him.”
Follansbee had folded his long, flexible fingers and was leaning his shoulders on the arms of his chair. His evil-looking eyes were slowly taking on a mocking twinkle as they looked at the features of the man in front of him.
The skilled specialist had no further doubt about the matter. At that moment he knew to a certainty that James Stone was mad, and that his was the most dangerous form of insanity, for it centered only on one object.
Outwardly and in his everyday life, Stone might move and conduct himself as an ordinary individual, but lurking always in his diseased brain was one wild and terrible fancy—an insane fear and hatred of the man who in the brighter, if less prosperous, past he had once risked his life to save.
It remained to be seen, however, in what Follansbee’s treatment of the case would consist.