Tisdale shook his head incredulously.
"Absurd," he said, with emphasis. "You saw the thing as well as I. What did it look like? Answer me that."
"Well, I must admit that it looked like Maria."
"I should say so. Wasn't it her face, her form, her dress? Do you suppose a man can forget the form of his wife? I tell you no. Not if he lived to be a thousand years old. Besides, I saw the mark of my fist upon her forehead, poor girl. Great God, to think that I should have struck her dead at my feet! She who once loved me more than all else on earth."
"Rube, you are acting like a perfect child!" exclaimed Callister, impatiently. "Here we are standing directly upon the verge of a precipice, as it were, and you give way like this. Detectives are on our track, man; the capture of Joe Dutton, unless he can be silenced most effectually, is likely to prove a fatal blow to us, and what we want is money—money alone will pull us through; without it all my influence in the business world will go for naught."
"Well, you have money, folks say. Use it—it is as much to your interest as the rest of us."
"Have I? So you say. Let me tell you, Rube Tisdale, that my stock operations of the last year have left me a well-nigh ruined man. I depended upon this bank affair to put me on my feet again. It has failed. If you had only preserved that parchment more carefully, every dollar of old Mansfield's wealth would now be within our grasp."
"Oh! stow that!" cried Tisdale, angrily. "What's the use of throwing all the blame on me? The bank affair proved a failure, didn't it! The parchment was lost, through my carelessness, I'll admit. Let's face matters as they are, and make the best of them we can. Come, let's be off out of this. We can do no more here to-night."
Callister blew out the lantern and opened the door.
"I go," he said, sulkily, "but, mark you, Rube, I shall return again. In a month's time, under the will of Jeremiah Mansfield, which fortunately is recorded in the Surrogate's office, even if you did lose the original, this house and all it contains belongs to me, if I can only catch that cub of a boy and turn him over to the law. Once in my possession, I'll raze it to the foundation stones but I'll discover the secret hidden by its moldering walls."