“Do you really need to have me explain to you?” he went on in a hard cynical manner. “As though you didn’t know! I don’t suppose you ever heard of the Union Bank of Penyank, for instance? Or Mr. Swayne, its president? Or Mr. Riley, or Mr. Mears, the cashier?”
At the mention of these, as at the mention of the automobile accident, there was something which seemed to click like a camera shutter in her eyes, only this time there was no sign of pain, none even of confusion. She seemed, except for a faint trace of color, to be fairly calm and poised. She opened her mouth slightly, but more in an attempted smile of tolerance than anything else.
“The Union Bank? Mr. Swayne? Mr. Tilney? What are you talking about?” she persisted. “Who is Mr. Swayne, and where is the Union Bank?”
“Really, now, Miss Carle,” he said with a kind of dogmatic fury, “if you want me to have any regard of any kind for you in the future, quit lying about this. You know well enough what I mean. You know who Mr. Swayne is, all right, and why he left Eastridge. You also know Mr. Diamondberg, although I heard you say you didn’t, and that right after I had seen you walking with him out here on the dunes three weeks ago. You don’t remember that, I suppose?” this as she fluttered slightly.
She stared, completely shaken out of her composure, and a real flush spread over her cheeks and neck. For the moment her expression hardened the least bit, then gave way to one of mingled weakness and confusion. She looked more or less guilty and genuinely distrait.
“Why, Mr. Gregory,” she pleaded weakly, “how you talk! Positively, I haven’t the slightest idea of what you mean, and I wish you wouldn’t be so rough. I don’t think you know what you’re talking about, or if you do you certainly don’t know anything about me. You must have me mixed up with some one else, or with something that I don’t know anything about.” She moved as if to leave.
“Now listen to me a minute,” he said sharply, “and don’t be so ready to leave. You know who I am, and just what I’m doing. I’m running an investigation bureau on my own account with which I mean to break up the present city political ring, and I have a lot of evidence which might cause Mr. Tilney and the mayor and some others a lot of trouble this fall, and they know it, and that’s why you’re out here. Mr. Tilney is connected with the mayor, and he used to be a bosom friend of your friend, Jack Swayne. And Diamondberg and Mrs. Skelton are in his employ right now, and so are you. You think I don’t know that Castleman and his friends were working with you and Mrs. Skelton, and Diamondberg and these ‘brokers’ also, and that Castleman tried to run into us the other night and kill me, and that I’m being watched here all the time and spied on, but I am, and I know it, and I’m not in the dark as to anything—not one thing—not even you,” and he leered at her angrily.
“Now wait a moment,” he went on quickly as she opened her mouth and started to say something. “You don’t look to me to be so crafty and devilish as all this seems, or I wouldn’t be talking to you at all, and your manner all along has been so different—you’ve appeared so friendly and sympathetic, that I’ve thought at times that maybe you didn’t know exactly what was going on. Now, however, I see that you do. Your manner the other morning at breakfast made me think that possibly you were not so bad as you seemed. But now I see that you’ve been lying to me all along about all this, just as I thought, only I must say that up to now I haven’t been willing to believe it. This isn’t the first time an attempt has been made to get people in this way, though. It’s an old political trick, only you’re trying to work it once more, and I don’t propose that you shall work it on me if I can help it. Plainly, you people wouldn’t hesitate to kill me, any more than Tilney hesitated to ruin Crothers three years ago, or than he would hesitate to ruin me or any other man or woman who got in his path, but he hasn’t got me yet, and he’s not going to, and you can tell him that for me. He’s a crook. He controls a bunch of crooks—the mayor and all the people working with him—and if you’re in with them, as I know you are, and know what you’re doing, you’re a crook too.”
“Oh, oh, oh! Don’t!” she exclaimed. “Please don’t! This is too terrible! To think that you should talk to me in this way!” but she made no attempt to leave.
“Now I want to tell you something more, Miss Carle—if that’s your real name—” Gregory went on as she was putting her hands to her temples and exclaiming, and she winced again. “As I said before, you don’t look to me to be as bad as you seem, and for that reason I’m talking to you now. But just see how it is: Here I am, a young man just starting out in the world really, and here you are trying to ruin me. I was living here with my wife and my little two-year-old baby peacefully enough until she had to go to the mountains because our little boy was taken sick, and then you and Mrs. Skelton and Diamondberg and Castleman and the ‘brokers’ and all the rest of the crowd that are and have been around here watching and spying, came and began to cause me trouble. Now I’m not helpless. And you needn’t think I wasn’t warned before you came, because I was. There are just as many influential men on my side of the fence right now as there are on Tilney’s—will be—and he isn’t going to get away with this thing as easily as he thinks. But just think of your part in all this! Why should you want to ruin me or help these people? What have I ever done to you? I can understand Tilney’s wanting to do it. He thinks that I have facts which will injure him, and I have, and that because I haven’t made any public statement the evidence is still in my hands, and that if I am put out of the way or discredited the whole thing will blow over and nothing will happen to him—but it won’t. Not now any more. It can’t. This thing will go on just the same, whether I am here or not. But that isn’t the point either. I was told two months ago that you would come, not by Mrs. Skelton, but by friends of mine, and that an attempt would be made on my life,” and at that she opened her eyes wide and sat there apparently amazed, “and here you are on schedule time and doing just as you were told, and apparently you aren’t the least bit ashamed to do it. But don’t you think it’s a pretty shabby game for you to play?” He stared at her wearily and she at him, but now for the moment she said nothing, just sat there.