Chapter V

Nadine Nelson rose as the blind man entered the room, her lips curved in a wonderful smile of joyous greeting, and she hurried across the floor to meet him.

“Can you ever forgive me?” he asked, in his rich, musical voice.

“Forgive you?” she cried happily. “Why, I could--kiss you!” She stopped, crimson-cheeked.

He smiled seriously down at her. “It was necessary, the way I spoke to you,” he said gently. “Before, I did not realise how desperate the game was. I knew that your father’s life hung on the thread of your silence. And I knew that the only way I could assure myself that you wouldn’t break down and talk was to arouse every bit of that wonderful fighting gameness you have. The men who had your father would have killed him rather than risk getting him away if they thought there was a breath of suspicion.”

“I know,” she said; “I know--and understand.”

“The ringleader talked a little to the chief on the way back in the revenue cutter,” went on Colton. “He had been a pal of your brother’s for years in South America. They worked together in a telegraph office in Rio.”

“He was a wonderful operator,” murmured the girl. “He is the only man I ever knew of who could imitate another man’s touch on the key. That was the proof that convinced father that he was Joe. You know the touch of an operator on a sender is as individual as handwriting.”

Colton nodded. “My knowledge of that fact is what threw me off the track at first. You knew your brother was implicated the minute you spoke of him in your room. I remembered then the stories I had heard of him. I remembered that he was fifteen years older than you, and was supposed to have been shot in South America ten years ago, where he went following some trouble here.”

“Joe always was wild,” the girl confessed softly, “though I only remember him as a big, strong brother who used to hold me on his knee while he told me wonderful stories. I couldn’t believe sometimes that the man who was making daddy do such horrible things could be the brother I knew. But I couldn’t convince father. The counterfeiter knew every incident of Joe’s life, and there was the touch of the operator that father thought was so indisputable. I tried to get father to confess it all. I refused to carry him the messages that were left in my room after we knew the secret-service men were watching us, and that Joe and his men were next door. Then Joe--I can’t call him anything else----”

“That is the name he has gone under for years,” put in Colton.

“Then Joe rigged up the magnets and key,” went on the girl. “He had to give father instructions every night where to distribute the counterfeit money that was packed in the vaults of the bank in place of the reserve. And he made father sell all his bonds to cover the shortage. Then, with the help of a watchman, who was another of the gang, they got the counterfeit money in to take the place of that father had gotten to make good. Every day Joe promised that he would make restitution, for he had made father believe that he had sent the money to Brazil for investment, and it would double in a month. So father hoped and prayed, and got years older every hour. The secret-service men were dogging every step, watching every move. Jail stared him in the face--and he believed the man he thought his son, believed that he would have the money to look the world squarely in the face once more.

“Then Joe told him one night, over the wire, that he had lost all. Father must go. I watched outside my door every night to see that Paul did not come near. I caught a word. I pleaded with father. For four days I fought against them. Then they won. I was at the door last night when father came running up the stairs, panting, half dead with the excitement of having slipped past the secret-service man. He darted past me. I followed. Joe grabbed me by the arm when I started to protest. ‘Get downstairs and throw a fit because your father has gone!’ he hissed. ‘You’ll be along in a little while, and be with him!’ he finished, and there was a look in his eyes that frightened me. So you see it wasn’t only acting in the library.” She shuddered.

Colton understood, even more than she, for he had heard the confession of the master counterfeiter on the revenue cutter that had brought them all back to the city. He had learned then why he had taken such pains to get the old man away. The crook had not been satisfied to take every dollar of the old man’s fortune. He had seen the girl; he had wanted her, and she was to have been the price of her father’s life!

“The chief’s men got the whole plant next door,” he put in hastily. “It’s a new process of bleaching one-dollar bills, and making hundreds from them with a new photographic process. The master crook had been perfecting it for years in Brazil, waiting for a big stake in New York. He put one of his assistants as correspondent of your father’s bank down there. A year ago he had him write a humble letter asking for a position in New York. Your father gave it to him.”

“Yes,” admitted the girl. “And the man who took the position was the one who posed as my brother. He pretended to be very dull. That’s why the secret-service men never suspected him. When he had been in the bank three months, father discovered a shortage of sixty thousand dollars. He accused the man who came from Brazil. Father’s bank, you know, is a private institution, and only has seven employees. The man confessed, and convinced father that he was Joe. He said he would make good the loss. And he did, with the clever counterfeits. That was the entering wedge. After that father was only putty in his hands. Six months ago he resigned, after seeing to it that one of his gang was put in as watchman and another took his place.”

“That is when he took up his role as doctor,” put in Colton, “and got his scheme of taking the poor Frenchman’s house. And at the hospital they say the Frenchman will recover fully.”

“And father is upstairs sleeping,” she said softly. “You brought him back to me--and he knows that the man who tried to ruin him, the man who would have killed him if you had not been there to prevent him when the revenue men came, was not his son! That is the greatest of all! We owe you a debt that we can never repay; you and Sydney, here, who stood so bravely by when I thought all the world had turned against me.”

She touched the arm of the black-haired man who had sat silent beside her, and he looked at her with a wonderful new light in his eyes. Gone, now, was Sydney Thames’s great fear of women that had been his obsession all his life. He had met _the_ woman.

“Can you ever forgive me, Thorn?” he asked, speaking for the first time. He had not even raised his eyes to the face of the man he had renounced that morning. Ever since Dryden Nelson had been brought back to his home, and the wireless message from the revenue cutter had opened the jail-door for the girl, his thoughts had been torturing him.

“I must forgive myself first,” the blind man said quietly. “It hurt me more than anything else to talk to you like that. But a man’s life hung in the balance. I could not tell you, for I knew you would tell the girl rather than see her suffer a minute.” One of his rare smiles lighted up his face. “Let’s make it a burned paper, more completely burned than the charred fragment I found in the Frenchman’s house; the part of a note one of the outside men sent to the master counterfeiter. For on that my fingers read three words: Joe, cage, _Carracas_. That finished the case--my case.” And his sightless eyes seemed to look at them with understanding and joy.

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THE EIGHTH PROBLEM

THE EYE OF THE SEVEN DEVILS