“Just a minute, Brent,” I said, “Do you think it possible he could have written the letter here?”
“I think it’s quite possible. He had the key to get in before, didn’t he? Made away with the newspaper clipping; the targets? Furthermore we’ve been mighty careless leaving letters on that table. He’s found Mrs. Northrop’s letter there too, I’d bet my life. How else could he have known her address. And, if he had known it before, he surely would have written her.”
True, I hadn’t seen that letter of Mrs. Northrop’s that she had sent to her son, after the day it came.
Brent had started to read the letter in his hand, so I sat back to listen intently.
Leatherstocking Lodge,
Harkness, N. Y.
Dear Mrs. Northrop:—
In a most unusual manner your address has fallen into my hands.
Otherwise, I would have written you before to tell you that your son is dead. It grieves me to write this so bluntly, but I know of no other way.
He has, in fact, been dead now, over a year and a half and the enclosed money really belongs to him. In short, he had every right to claim it, had he lived, and you being the mother deprived of her only son, it goes to you.
At least it will give you the material comforts which your son’s death and long absence has probably deprived you of already.
Allow me to say that knowing your son Peter as I did, I can sympathize with you in your grief at this revelation of his death. I know it has blighted my life completely!
Perhaps it will console you a little to know that he lost his life for another, who was absolutely unworthy to breath the air that Peter Northrop did.
And his body, too clean to rest in a tainted grave, has reached the clear waters of which he seemed a very part.
By the time you receive this, let me assure you that he will have found his Paradise and God.
In telling you this and by your leave, dear lady, my own tortured soul will find some peace and be ready to face its maker.
Good-bye!
In the short silence following Brent’s reading, I felt that through it all I had seen revealed the naked soul of Roland McClintick.
CHAPTER XXXIII—FACE TO FACE
Veiled though the wording of that letter was, we had understood, where the good, but ignorant, people in Coovers Falls had not. And what a blessing their ignorance was!
“How he must have suffered!” Tom murmured.
Brent sighed. “With all McClintick’s ability to make money,” he said, “and his supposed strength of will, the son, with his apparent weakness for gambling and draft-dodging, proved the stronger.”