“There was no theft about it. She came with me. Later she went back to her husband. I left the place, started to practise law, and married. My wife never heard the story until to-night.” He looked down at Dell Martin’s letter, not yet read by him, topping the documents on the table in front of him. “It’s an old story,” he said, “and one not likely to explode unless——”
“Unless what?” Laflin demanded from the gloom.
“Unless I choose to revive it by an overt act,” Stroude retorted. “It all happened more than twenty-five years ago in a tiny community in the mountains. I know the people there. They’re my kind, my stock. They won’t talk to strangers coming in. There’s only one way the newspapers could get the story. I’d have to lead them to it.”
“That’s true,” old man Wilk grunted. “I know the mountains.”
“Then it’s settled,” Manning said with evident relief. “I fancy a story as old as that, cut off altogether by the time between, could not be a very appalling Banquo’s ghost.” He arose a little wearily. “You’ll be at the conference to-morrow?” He named the time and place. “It’s necessary that you should be. Without you, Covinger may switch. You may have to combat Carmichael directly. You’ll be ready?”
“If I’m—if it’s necessary,” Stroude said.
The other two men stood up. Wilk unwieldily, Laflin with quick ease, smiling at Stroude as he held out his hand. “This was a real star-chamber session,” he said, “according to the best rules of old Peter Armond. Wouldn’t the old pirate have loved to sit in a ten-minute game of four men who decided the next president?”
“What do you mean?” Rhoda’s voice rang out in challenge, and Manning and Wilk rushed to speech to head off Laflin, but he went on in almost boyish unconcern: “Old Peter trained me, you know, and I’ve always had a soft spot for him in my heart, although I’ve known what a wolf in sheep’s clothing he was. We have to hand it to him, though, that with all his grafting and his materialism, he was a great party builder. He was the first of the Warwicks in American national life. We’re just rattling around in his shoes, but we’ll do our best to put you over.”
He moved off, almost pushed by Manning’s eagerness to depart, but his voice seemed to linger in the room after the three of them had gone. Stroude sat toying with a paper-knife. Rhoda, deep in the shadows, did not stir. A clock in the hall boomed twelve. Stroude, sighing, put his hand over Dell Martin’s letter. Then Rhoda spoke. “Is Mr. Laflin telling the truth about my father,” she asked Stroude, “or what he thinks is the truth?”
“The truth.”