"And they have the right road."
"Then our only hope is that they may not know the right place."
"God grant it," said Mrs. Knapp.
She was silent for a few minutes, and I saw that her eyes were filled
with tears.
I was moved by her signs of feeling. I thought they were for the boy
and was about to ask what would happen to him in case he was found by
the enemy, when she said:
"Now tell me about Henry Wilton--how he died and when."
Again the vision of my first dreadful night in San Francisco rose
before me, the cries for help from my murdered friend rang in my ears,
and the scene in the alley and the figure in the morgue burned before
my eyes.
I told the tale as it had happened, and as I told it I read in the face
before me the varying emotions of alarm, horror and grief that were
stirred by its incidents.
But one thing I could not tell her. The wolf-face I had seen in the
lantern flash in the alley I could not name nor describe to the wife of
Doddridge Knapp. Yet at the thought the dark mystery grew darker, yet,
and I began to doubt what my eyes had seen, and my ears had heard.
Mrs. Knapp bowed her head in deep, gloomy thought.
"I feared it, yet he would not listen to my warnings," she murmured.
"He would work his own way." Then she looked me suddenly straight in
the face.
"And why did you take his place, his name? Why did you try to do his
work when you had seen the dreadful end to which it had brought him?"
I confessed that it was half through the insistence of Detective Coogan
that I was Henry Wilton, half through the course of events that seemed
to make it the easiest road to reach the vengeance that I had vowed to
bring the murderer of my friend.
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