all you wanted to know. Besides," the man smiled his diabolical
grin again, "there was a reason for going light on the details. At the
time I held you up I hadn't any more idea than you had where John Massey
was, nor whether he was even alive. It was the weak spot in my armor.
But you were so panic stricken at the thought of having to give up your
gentleman's fortune that you never looked at the hollowness of the thing.
You could have bowled over my whole scheme in a minute by being honest
and telling me to bring on your cousin, John Massey. But you didn't. You
were only too afraid I would bring him on before you could buy me off. I
knew I could count on your being blind and rotten. I knew my man."

"Then you don't know now whether John Massey is alive or not?" Alan asked
after a pause during which he let the full irony of the man's confession
sink into his heart and turn there like a knife in a wound.

"That is where you're dead wrong. I do know. I made it my business to
find out. It was too important to have an invulnerable shield not to
patch up the discrepancy as early as possible. It took me a year to get
my facts and it cost a good chink of the filthy, but I got them. I not
only know that John Massey is alive but I know where he is and what he is
doing. I could send for him to-morrow, and cook your goose for you
forever, young man."

He pulled himself up on one elbow to peer into Alan's gloomy face.

"I may do it yet," he added. "You needn't offer me hush money. It's no
good to me, as I told you. I don't want money. I only want to pass the
time until the reaper comes along. You'll grant that it would be amusing
to me to watch the see-saw tip once more, to see you go down and your
cousin John come up."

Alan was on his feet again now, striding nervously from door to window
and back again. He had wanted to know. Now he knew. He had knowledge
bitter as wormwood. The man had lied before. He was not lying now.

"What made you send that wire? Were you on the track, too, trying to
find out on your own where your cousin is?"

"Not exactly. Lord knows I didn't want to know. But I had a queer hunch.
Some coincidences bobbed up under my nose that I didn't like the looks
of. I met a young man a few days ago that was about the age John would
have been, a chap with a past, who had run away from a circus. The thing
stuck in my crop, especially as there was a kind of shadowy resemblance
between us that people noticed."

"