to seventy-five hundred dollars.  The lawyer had presented a petition signed apparently by Wilson and a bond also subscribed by him, to which had been appended the names of certain sureties.  One of these was a William R. Hubert—­the same William R. Hubert who had mysteriously disappeared when his presence was so vital to the happiness and liberty of his creator.  But the City Chamberlain had not been on his guard, and had paid over the seventy-five hundred dollars to Browne without ever having seen the claimant or suspecting for an instant that all was not right.

It was further discovered at the same time that Browne had made several other attempts to secure legacies remaining uncalled for in the city’s treasury.  In how many cases he had been successful will probably never be known, but it is unlikely that his criminal career dated only from the filing of the forged Petersen deed in 1896.

Browne made an heroic and picturesque fight to secure a reversal of his conviction through all the State courts, and his briefs and arguments are monuments to his ingenuity and knowledge of the law.  He alleged that his conviction was entirely due to a misguided enthusiasm on the part of the prosecutor, the present writer, whom he characterized as a “novelist” and dreamer.  The whole case, he alleged, was constructed out of the latter’s fanciful imagination, a cobweb of suspicion, accusation and falsehood.  Some day his friend Hubert would come out of the West, into which he had so unfortunately disappeared, and release an innocent man, sentenced, practically to death, because the case had fallen into the hands of one whose sense of the dramatic was greater than his logic.

Perchance he will.  Mayhap, when H. Huffman Browne is the oldest inmate of Sing Sing, or even sooner, some gray-haired figure will appear at the State Capitol, and knock tremblingly at the door of the Executive, asking for a pardon or a rehearing of the case, and claiming to be the only original, genuine William R. Hubert—­such a denouement would not be beyond the realms of possibility, but more likely the request will come in the form of a petition, duly attested and authenticated before some notary in the West, protesting against Browne’s conviction and incarceration, and bearing the flowing signature of William R. Hubert—­the same signature that appears on Browne’s deeds to Levitan—­the same that is affixed to the bond of George Wilson, the vanished farmhand, claimant to the estate of Jane Elizabeth Barker.

IX.

A Murder Conspiracy[4]