“Ah! blackmail. I thought so.”
Iredale’s contempt was biting.
“Call it what you like, Mr. George Iredale. I tell you this, you are in my power and you will have to buy my silence. You like plain speaking; and now you’ve got it. Refuse compliance, and I leave here to expose you.”
“Pooh,” said Iredale, leisurely turning to the window. “Do you think I’m a babe? How are you going to prove your charge? Why, you must be the veriest simpleton to think I am unprepared. By the time you can bring the law about me there will not remain a trace of––my work. You can never bring your charge home.”
“Ah, you think not.” Hervey’s words sounded like a snarl. The whisky he had drunk had worked him to a proper pitch. He had not done yet. His next shot was to be a long one and a bold one, and he was not sure where it would hit. He was not sure that it might not rebound and––but his was the nature which makes for success or disaster without a second thought. For him there was no middle course. His temperament was volcanic and his actions were largely governed by the passionate nature which was his. Iredale had not turned from the window, or he would have seen the evil working of that face. His own great, broad shoulders were set squarely before Hervey’s gaze, and the uncompromising attitude only added fuel to the latter’s already superheated feelings. “Perhaps you might find it interesting to know that they are hot upon the trail of the man who shot Leslie Grey.”
Iredale swung round like a flash. Nor were the 237 storm-clouds which but now frowned in the heavens more black than the expression of his face.
“You miserable hound!” he cried, his eyes sparkling, and his jaw muscles fairly quivering with the force of his clenching teeth. “What hellish crime would you attempt to fix on me now?”
Hervey grinned with all the ferocity of a tiger.
“I wish to fix no crime on you. I merely mention a fact. Leslie Grey was the only accuser of his murderer. He stated before he died that the man who inserted the notice in the paper which ran, ‘Yellow booming––slump in Grey,’ was the man who murdered him. I suppose you don’t happen to know who was responsible for that enigmatical line? You did not inspire it?”
The look that accompanied the man’s words was fiendish. The great eyes shone with a savage light They expressed a hatred which no words could describe. Iredale’s hands clenched and unclenched. His fingers seemed as though they were clutching at something which they longed to tear to atoms, and his thoughts centred upon the man before him.