“Buy her off? It would take too much, if we began that game. Besides, why should I?”
The young man was evidently puzzled.
“The only thing she can do,” Brainard explained, “is to produce a wife or heirs to Krutzmacht. I don’t believe she can do that successfully. If she does, I am quite ready to resign without a fight. But,” he repeated musingly, “I don’t believe she can prove that she was his wife.”
“There would be harder things to prove,” the secretary ventured, “especially in a California court!”
Brainard smiled. He knew that Farson thought him a fool to run the risk of a law suit and possibly failure in exposing fraudulent claims to the property that he held on such slight legal authority.
“I believe I never told you the whole story,” he said. “You probably think, if you think about it at all—just as Hollinger thinks—that I am a lucky and none-too-scrupulous adventurer, who had a fortune dropped into his hands by a peculiar accident and have enjoyed its possession undisturbed by any claimants up to this moment. But it isn’t quite like that. And there’s rather more drama in the true story of Krutzmacht’s fortune than anything we have yet offered at the People’s Theater!”
He took another cigar, remade the fire, and told Farson all the details of his hunt for the vague Melody ever since he had first found positive indications of her existence in the deserted house above Monument.
“Latterly,” he concluded, “Melody has grown somewhat dim in my mind. Perhaps the theater has taken her place as reality and as mistress; for I have always thought of myself as doing it with her money! But to-night when that woman turned up here with her vulgar, brazen air and tried to hold me up in a blackmailing way, something made me feel that Melody is still alive, in spite of all the chances that she isn’t, and that she will turn up in time to get her own.”
“She will have to appear soon!” Farson exclaimed.
“I felt in talking to Lorilla that she was perfectly conscious she has no legal right to the money—knew all along that Krutzmacht was married and had an heir or had made a will—”