He placed his trembling fingers upon the handle of a drawer, and opened it. He turned over some papers, and drew forth a letter. It bore the signature, “E. Wilton,” in a bold hand.
“There is his handwriting,” he said to Chewkle, in a hoarse voice, and with a sickly smile.
“Bless my wig!” said Mr. Chewkle, as he gazed on it with admiring eyes. “A prime clear sort of writing.”
He drew from his pocket a parchment.
“What is that?” inquired Mr. Grahame, with chattering teeth.
“The deed that Wilton wouldn’t sign,” responded Chewkle. “Have you got a piece of thin paper?” he asked.
Mr. Grahame, with a beating heart and trembling hand, gave him half a sheet of thin post.
“That will just do,” he said.
He then put his hand into his side pocket and produced a small phial containing a thin fluid with a pink tinge; he produced a camel-hair pencil, and, steeping it in the liquid, painted over the back of that portion of the note which contained the signature of Wilton. Mr. Grahame, with eyes starting out of their sockets, watched him without breathing. After waiting for a minute, he examined Wilton’s sign-manual carefully, and then laying it upon the thin paper which he had previously damped, he slightly burnished the back, and there appeared upon the thin paper the signature of Wilton reversed. This he, in turn, laid upon the deed, on the place for the name of the person signing the deed to appear, and again using the burnisher with more firmness, he reproduced, though somewhat faintly, the name of Wilton upon the deed.
“Now,” said he to Mr. Grahame, “there it is; you have only to mark over it carefully, and the name will be there with such exactness the man himself couldn’t swear it wasn’t his’n.”