“I’m going to Lincoln’s Inn Fields to have an interview with Palford & Grimby.”
“That’s a good enough move,” commented Tembarom, “if you think you can prove what you say. You’ve got to prove things, you know. I couldn’t, so I lay low and waited, just like I told you.”
“Of course, of course,” Palliser himself almost grinned in his derision. “You have only been waiting.”
“When you’ve got to prove a thing, and haven’t much to go on, you’ve got to wait,” said T. Tembarom—“to wait and keep your mouth shut, whatever happens, and to let yourself be taken for a fool or a horse-thief isn’t as gilt-edged a job as it seems. But proof’s what it’s best to have before you ring up the curtain. You’d have to have it yourself. So would Palford & Grimby before it’d be stone-cold safe to rush things and accuse a man of a penitentiary offense.”
He took his unconventional half-seat on the edge of the table, with one foot on the floor and the other one lightly swinging. “Palford & Grimby are clever old ducks, and they know that much. Thing they’d know best would be that to set a raft of lies going about a man who’s got money enough to defend himself, and to make them pay big damages for it afterward, would be pretty bum business. I guess they know all about what proof stands for. They may have to wait; so may you, same as I have.”
Palliser realized that he was in the position of a man striking at an adversary whose construction was of india-rubber. He struck home, but left no bruise and drew no blood, which was an irritating thing. He lost his temper.
“Proof!” he jerked out. “There will be proof enough, and when it is made public, you will not control the money you threaten to use.”
“When you get proof, just you let me hear about it,” T. Tembarom said. “And all the money I’m threatening on shall go where it belongs, and I’ll go back to little old New York and sell papers if I have to. It won’t come as hard as you think.”
The flippant insolence with which he brazened out his pretense that he had not lied, that his ridiculous romance was actual and simple truth, suggested dangerous readiness of device and secret knowledge of power which could be adroitly used.
“You are merely marking time,” said Palliser, rising, with cold determination to be juggled with no longer. “You have hidden him away where you think you can do as you please with a man who is an invalid. That is your dodge. You’ve got him hidden somewhere, and his friends had better get at him before it is too late.”