"Ah, that explains your ignorance. The man had not shown his hand at that time. Now I am going to trust to your affection for Miss Cunningham, to your presumable wish to save her from unhappiness, and talk to you as though we had been allies instead of enemies. Perhaps I may be a fool for my pains; but something seems to say to me—"
"Something says right. Go on!" he ejaculated, gruffly.
No doubt the very most dunder-headed of lawyers or detectives would have told me that I was mad, thus deliberately to give all my good trumps away to the treacherous, hired scoundrel whom I had been hunting down with the dogged ferocity of a bloodhound. On principle, of course, I was all wrong, and I knew it; but still I went on.
I told him the strange story of the past few weeks from beginning to end. I commenced with the part which concerned Farnham and Carson Wildred alone. I did not pass over that which had to do with Karine, my hopeless and unrequited love for her, my passionate anxiety to serve her at all costs; and I ended by declaring my certainty that Carson Wildred and Willis Collins were one and the same man.
"He is doubly a murderer," I said. "And yet, unless you and I together can keep him from it, he will be your sister's husband."
"I'll kill him first!" exclaimed my companion.
"I think the trick can be done without resorting to such extreme measures as that," I returned, "especially if you are willing to come over from his camp to mine."
He looked at me sharply for a moment without answering, then he said:
"You seem pretty quick, I've noticed, in what you've just been telling me at putting two and two together. Well, you say you were at the Santa Anna Hotel the night the murder was committed ten years ago. You knew there were two men mixed up in it. You remembered one of them; would you remember the other?"
"He was a mere boy," I said, "and it's a long time ago. He must have changed almost beyond recognition."