“It was 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.”

“That is interesting.  And his name?”

“He goes under the name of Carson—­Richard Carson.”

Roberts nodded.

“The same.  Good boy.  You have succeeded in finding your cousin.  Congratulations!” he cackled maliciously.

“Then it really is he?”

“Not a doubt of it.  He was taken up by a family named Holiday in Dunbury, Massachusetts.  They gave him a home, saw that he got some schooling, started him on a country newspaper.  He was smart, took to books, got ahead, was promoted from one paper to another.  He is on a New York daily now, making good still, I’m told.  Does it tally?”