Chapter IX (3)

“You have been engaged in a conspiracy to ruin my friend, Mr. Cargill. You induced him to give you $5,000 to invest in a mine named the Longfellow, near Denver, and give you his note for $5,000, and you told him you were paying $15,000 more, and that, you said, made up the entire purchase money. To insure his joining you, you showed him a letter from the manager of the mine named George Williams, showing that very large profits were being made. You knew Mr. Cargill’s anxiety to make some money, so that his wife, who had had so many rich offers, might not pine for the wealth which might have been hers. O, revenge was sweet to you, and you played your cards well. Too well, my friend, for your own comfort now. You thought to wreck their happiness this fair Christmas eve, did you; well, there is going to be some wrecking done, my friend, but it is here in this house--_your_ home--where it is going to occur and not over the way in the home of the woman you once said you loved.

“Your whole plot is laid bare. I hold in my hand in your own handwriting a full and detailed confession of your villainy which you wrote out last night and sent to my friend, together with the note for $5,000, which you acknowledged you had got from him by fraud. There it is, and see, you have endorsed it in your own handwriting, and added your private stamp to it. In the same letter you gave my friend the name of your accomplice, George Williams, and his address, and when I showed him your letter he confessed everything too, and told me a good deal more of your dealings than was needful for my case.”

“It is all a lie, that letter is a forgery, I never wrote it, and that note was stolen from the bank last night,” shrieked the banker, goaded to desperation, “I will send for the police.”

“You need not send far, there is one outside the door,” returned Wilfred. Then, opening the door, he summoned the officer to enter.

“This officer in private clothes is the policeman who was on duty last night, and saw you enter the bank office, unlock the safe, take out a document, and after closing the safe, write a letter which you enclosed in a long envelope and placed with your own hand in Mr. Cargill’s letter-box. Am I not right, officer?”

“Entirely correct, sir.”

The banker sat paralyzed, his brain benumbed with the extraordinary statement made to him. Was it all a dream, or was he going mad? And then like a flash of lightning he recollected inquiring that morning if the servant knew what had made his slippers so wet; it was the snow--the accursed snow, as he crossed the street to Mr. Cargill’s. Ah! now he knew they were speaking the truth; besides, that was undoubtedly his handwriting and his seal; and that was beyond all question the genuine note.

“Then,” resumed the inexorable Wilfred, mindful only of his sister’s pain, “ignorant of what you had done in your sleeping hours and being unable to find the note which you had returned to its rightful owner, you imagined you had mislaid it, and lest your darling revenge for which you had imperilled your soul, should escape you, you forged a fresh note, which being of course unpaid, you have sent to the notary’s for protest.

“Dick Strangely, you have played for a high stake--the wrecking of a happy home--and you have lost. That is all, this bright snowy Christmas eve! In my hand here I hold a warrant for your arrest on a charge of conspiracy with Williams to defraud Cargill, and also on a charge of forgery. I have obtained an injunction preventing the notary from parting with the forged note which he holds, and I have Williams safe in prison ready to bear evidence against you.”

As one by one the banker heard of the steps taken to close every door against his escape, his head drooped lower and lower.

“Save me,” he murmured brokenly at last, “I’m a poor, desperate, broken-hearted man, save me, and I’ll make restitution.”

As he glanced on the two faces beside him (the policeman had retired to the passage) he saw on the one, that of Cargill, a mingling of relief and amazement--for the revelations were not one whit the less surprising to him than to the banker--and on the other only relentless determination.

As he recognized the latter he sank on his knees and begged for mercy, offering to pay back double what he had defrauded his former friend Cargill of.

The two brothers-in-law stepped apart for a moment to confer. “Wilfred,” urged the husband’s voice, “this man was until recently a friend. He became an enemy because Nell refused him for me. Her rejection of his desperate love for her has made a scoundrel of him; I imagine it would have made a villain of me too. I surely can afford to be generous when I win all around. I cannot send a man I once called by the name of friend to jail on Christmas eve. Wait here, and I will go across and talk the matter over with my wife; she ought to be consulted on this business.”

“Bring her here,” was the laconic reply.

And so it happened that the mercy which Dick Strangely subsequently received that night was taken humbly and penitently from the hand of the woman he once professed to love, but whose husband and home he ultimately tried to ruin.

The banker returned the money that night of which he had defrauded his friend, and he also returned the mortgages. He offered indeed to pay back double, but his offer was refused with scorn and loathing.

Dinner at Mr. Cargill’s was an hour late that night, but it was eaten with great joy and happiness of heart. “The happiest Christmas eve of my life,” exclaimed Mrs. Cargill with eyes whose radiance was momentarily dimmed by their moisture; and so said they all.

“Wilfred,” exclaimed the happy wife and sister as she rose from table to leave the two gentlemen to their after-dinner cigar, “I will never, never understand how you accomplished what you did. I believe you must have hypnotized Mr. Strangely. Did you, sir, tell me?”

“Perhaps,” was the reply with a curious smile curling the outer wave of his moustache. “Ben, the port wine is with you!”

“Tell me, Wilfred, how you managed it,” pressed his brother-in-law.

“Well,” replied the other after a pause, “it is not fair to make me disclose the secrets of my success, but I had a good deal of influence over that fellow Strangely, at school. On one occasion I caught him at a very disgraceful trick and gave him a very memorable thrashing. After that he seemed to drift into my power somehow, partly by reason of his disgrace, which I kept to myself, and partly because a good thrashing is an excellent beginning in hypnotism among boys. As the result, I could make him do anything I liked. With such a ground-work I had no difficulty in bringing him under my influence last night, more especially as I have become a pretty successful hypnotist by long practice and study.”

“Could you, do you think, have made him do what he did if you had not known him previously?”

“No, I think I would probably have had to go to work some other way with him, but I imagine he would have had to disgorge all the same. Hypnotism as an art is full of resources.”

THE END.

GLANCING SHAFTS.