Bofinger, with his instinct for blackmail, already saw clearly into the case. A misanthrope in love, who, to conceal his purpose, hid his identity and feigned to be considering an adoption; and a woman who, on her side, refused to reveal her address presented to him the familiar conjunction of senility and the adventuress. When he had asked his client how long he had known Sheila Vaughn he had had a motive. To him, the vital issue was to learn whether this shabby, odd client had means. Confident that the woman must have already secured that information, when he learned that the intimacy had already existed four months he felt certain that if she had played so carefully it was for no mean stake.
To his keen sense of his own opportunities the eccentric character of his client, all suspicion and mistrustful cunning, provoked a professional eagerness to meet and dupe so unusual an antagonist. He did not formulate a plan yet, but he had that strange, excited premonition of success, which, though it deceive a hundred times, gains always with the temperament of the gambler an easy credence.
He went to the court-room, where he transacted some business, and towards four o'clock hastened back to the office. To his great irritation Toby was nowhere to be seen, but on going to his desk he discovered a note on which was scrawled:
Max Fargus
The Oyster House Man.
Bofinger pounced upon it with a cry of exultation. Max Fargus, proprietor of half a dozen oyster houses, was a character known to the city by a score of anecdotes of eccentricity and greed. He crushed the paper in his hand and swung out triumphantly.
"Fargus is worth half a million, if a cent," he said joyfully. "What luck, eh! The woman is playing for marriage of course. Bo, I begin to see where you come in!"
As he hastened towards the Square, dodging amid the filth of Sixth Avenue, he amused himself by sketching the portrait of the woman as he imagined her.
"Yes, sure, its a question of marriage," he thought. "It must be if she has played as close as that for four months. She's a clever one, I bet, an old hand. I wonder if I know her."