And Mike, with all his roughness, uncouth manners, and scoundrelly principles, was a well-educated, well-bred person, who had gone wrong, or whose natural propensities for evil had dominated every other impulse within him.
Just why Mike should be there in that room at the dead of night, Lynne did not know, and at the moment could not guess, although he thought that he could read between the lines and conjecture upon it vaguely.
Carleton Lynne recalled the fact that once when he was in the company of Henry Carroll—now on his way to the death chair at Sing Sing—and this same Red Mike, he had been led to talk about his rich uncle in the East, J. Cephas Lynne, and to speak of the millions possessed by that relative whom he had not seen since he was a child; and since Patsy found Carleton Lynne in Idaho, and had related to him all that had happened to bring about the death of J. Cephas Lynne and his only daughter, Edythe, and to take to New York a man who personated Carleton Lynne—well, the rightful heir had been enabled to understand something of the conditions that had brought about such a strange circumstance; or rather, such a condition of circumstances.
He could understand, or thought he could, how, after he was supposed to be dead, Carroll had remembered that conversation in which reference to the rich uncle had been made; how Carroll had looked the matter up, had learned of the death of Cephas Lynne and the daughter, and that the great fortune was going a-begging.
And so—well, Henry Carroll had possessed himself of the papers and old photographs of his supposedly dead associate, and had finally gone East to impersonate Lynne, and to make claim to the fortune.
And now, as Lynne faced Red Mike, there in his own sleeping room, he could understand, too, how the desperado had been all the time on the track of Carroll, resolved that he would force some kind of a division of the wealth from the man who had once been Lynne’s partner.
But then things had taken another turn.
Carroll had fallen under the influence of a woman—Mrs. Hurd-Babbington; he had committed the crimes which were speeding him toward the death chair, and the rightful heir had been found in this man who was now sitting so calmly in his bed, facing the armed man who had intruded upon the privacy of his room in the dead of night.
That was the exact situation at the moment as nearly as it can be explained here.
There had been no difficulty in establishing the identity of the real Carleton Lynne, and in proving his right to inherit the millions of J. Cephas Lynne, and so now, at this moment, he was the master of millions—and be it said, as little affected by that mastery as if they had been counted by units instead of by hundreds of thousands.