"Whatever they believe, what I'm telling you is so."
"Well, what of it? Your son won't come back to life just because he was killed by mistake—if he was."
"That woman killed him!"
"Maybe."
"Damn you and your maybes! She did! If you're going to fool around with any other numbskull ideas you might just as well go back to 'Frisco now. You and your damned—"
"I'll go back to San Francisco when I'm ready," I said unpleasantly. "And it won't be just now. I'm at the Great Western Hotel. Don't bother me unless you want to talk sense for a change."
His curses followed me down the stairs. The secretary hovered around the bottom step, smiling apologetically.
"A fine old rowdy," I growled.
"A remarkably vital personality," the secretary murmured.
IV
From the old man's house I went down to the Herald and hunted up the murdered man's secretary. She was a small girl of nineteen or twenty with wide chestnut eyes, light brown hair and a pale pretty face. Her name was Lewis.
She said she hadn't known about the check and letter that had brought me from San Francisco.
"But then," she explained, "Mr. Willsson always liked to keep everything to himself as long as he could. It was—I—I don't think he trusted anybody here—completely."
"Not you?"
She flushed and said: "No. But of course he didn't know any of us very well. He had been here only such a short time."
"There must have been more to it than that," I protested.
"Well," she bit her lip and made a row of forefinger prints down the polished edge of the dead man's desk top, "his father wasn't—wasn't in sympathy with what he was doing, and his father really owned the papers, so I guess it was natural for Mr. Donald to think some of the employes might be more loyal to Mr. Elihu than to him."
"The old man wasn't in favor of the clean-up campaign? Then why did he stand for it, if the papers were his?"
She bent her head to study the fingerprints she had made, and her voice was sol low that I had to lean closer to catch the words.
"It's—it's not easy to understand unless you know— The last time Mr. Elihu was taken sick he sent for Donald—Mr. Donald. Mr. Donald had lived in Europe most of his life, you know. Dr. Pride had told Mr. Elihu that he'd have to turn all his business affairs over to someone else, so he cabled his son to come home. But when he got here Mr. Elihu couldn't make up his mind to let go of everything. But he wanted Mr. Donald to stay, so he made him publisher of the papers. Mr. Donald liked that because he had been interested in journalism in Paris, and when he found out how terrible everything was herein civic affairs and so on—he started that reform campaign. He didn't know—he had been away since he was a boy—and he didn't know—he didn't—"
"He didn't know his father was in it as deep as anybody else," I helped her along.
She squirmed a little over her examination of the fingerprints on the desk, nodded reluctantly, and went on:
"Mr. Elihu and he had a quarrel. Mr. Elihu told him to stop stirring things up, but Mr. Donald wouldn't. Maybe he would have if he had known—all there was to know. But I don't suppose it would ever have occurred to him that his father could have been really—deep in it. And Mr. Elihu wouldn't tell him. I guess it would be hard for a father to tell a son a thing like that. He threatened to take the papers away from him. But Mr. Donald said he'd start one of his own, and he
