“Please say to Mrs. Willoughby that I must see her before Senator Garston’s funeral. I am at the Waldorf, and will come at once on her summons.”
On his way to the Belgravia, Senator Alynton read the “copious accounts” in the leading journals. The case seemed to be a clear one. The newspapers confirmed Mr. Haygood Apchurch’s statement that the dead millionaire had borrowed his friend’s apartments to use a couple of weeks in briefing up a great speech upon “the financial situation.” A speech destined never to be delivered!
In fact, some of the drafts of the future masterpiece, and the usual personal contents of a rich man’s pocketbook were the only papers found in the rooms. There was not even the foundation stone of a mystery.
The checks, railway passes, club cards, etc., were not accompanied by a single family paper.
It was “justly remarked by all that the country had sustained a great loss in the counsels of so distinguished and successful a Western money magnate as James Garston,” etc., in the usual vein.
Alynton glanced over the platitudes as to being “cut off in his prime,” the usual references, de rigueur, to the “zenith of his powers,” and his being a man of “an already national reputation”—the lightly tossed journalistic wreath of immortelles!
One or two daring writers had timidly referred to the long fight which had raised the deceased from a working Western low-grade lawyer in a mining town to a money power in the financial centers of the East and West.
“That no immediate family falls heir to the honorable record of the departed is an element of sadness crowning a lonely career, embittered by many hard struggles with fate.”
Such perfunctory phrases covered the gap between the unknown past of the “man who had arrived” and the lonely splendor of his final elevation.
After Alynton had satisfied himself that Mr. Haygood Apchurch knew nothing whatever of Garston’s past, the distinguished member of the secret syndicate drove rapidly down to Judge Hiram Endicott’s office.