“The lad,” returned Hogan, “must be himself a dupe. He can have had no suspicion of the message he carried. Let me read it to you; it will make all clear.”
Hogan drew a taper nearer, and spreading the paper upon the table, he smoothed it out, and read:
HONOURED SIR,
The bearer of the present should, if he rides well, outstrip another messenger I have dispatched to you upon a fool's errand, with a letter addressed to one Mr. Lane at the sign of the Anchor. The bearer of that is none other than the notorious malignant, Sir Crispin Galliard, by whose hand your son was slain under your very eyes at Worcester, whose capture I know that you warmly desire and with whom I doubt not you will know how to deal. To us he has been a source of no little molestation; his liberty, in fact, is a perpetual menace to our lives. For some eighteen years this Galliard has believed dead a son that my cousin bore him. News of this son, whom I have just informed him lives—as indeed he does—is the bait wherewith I have lured him to your address. Forewarned by the present, I make no doubt you will prepare to receive him fittingly. But ere that justice he escaped at Worcester be meted out to him at Tyburn or on Tower Hill, I would have you give him that news touching his son which I am sending him to you to receive. Inform him, sir, that his son, Jocelyn Marleigh...
Hogan paused, and shot a furtive glance at Galliard. The knight was leaning forward now, his eyes strained, his forehead beaded with perspiration, and his breathing heavy.
“Read on,” he begged hoarsely.
His son, Jocelyn Marleigh, is the bearer of this letter, the man whom he has injured and who detests him, the youth with whom he has, by a curious chance, been in much close association, and whom he has known as Kenneth Stewart.
“God!” gasped Crispin. Then with sudden vigour, “Oh, 'tis a lie,” he cried, “a fresh invention of that lying brain to torture me.”
Hogan held up his hand.
“There is a little more,” he said, and continued: