"Meaning that there was a time when you didn't believe it?" Raymer asked.
"Meaning that there was a time when he had me scared half to death," confessed the one who seemed always to say the confidential thing as if it were the most trivial. "Do you remember one day in the library, when you found me looking over the files of the newspapers for the story of the robbery of the Bayou State Security Bank in New Orleans?"
Raymer remembered it very well, and admitted it.
"That was the time when the dreadful idea was scaring me stiff," she went on. "You remember the story, don't you? how the president--our Mr. Galbraith here--was held up at the point of a pistol and marched to the paying teller's window, and how the robber escaped on a river steamboat and was recognized by somebody and was arrested at St. Louis?"
"Yes; I remember it all very clearly. Also I recollect how the second newspaper notice told how he escaped from the officers at St. Louis. Wasn't there something about a young woman being mixed up in it some way?"
"There was: _she_ was the one who recognized the robber disguised as a deck-hand on the boat."
Raymer seemed to have forgotten his impatience for a renewal of the interview with the Pineboro Railroad master car builder.
"I don't seem to recall any mention of that in the newspapers," he said half-doubtfully.
"The newspaper reporters didn't put two and two together, but I did," asserted the sharer of confidences. "There was a young woman getting a draft cashed at the teller's window when the robbery was committed. The bank people didn't know her, so she must have been travelling. You see it's simple enough when you put your mind to it."
"But you haven't told me how you were scared," Raymer suggested.
"I'm coming to that. This escape we read about happened on a certain day in April. It was the very day on which poppa met me on my way back from Florida, and we took the eleven-thirty train north that night. You haven't forgotten that Mr. Griswold was a passenger on that same train?"
"But, goodness gracious, Miss Margery! any number of people were passengers on that train. You surely wouldn't----"
"Hush!" she said, and through the lace window hangings Broffin saw her lift a warning finger. "What I am telling you, Mr. Raymer, is in the strictest confidence; we mustn't let a breath of it get out. But that wasn't all. Mr. Griswold was dreadfully sick, and, of course, he couldn't tell us anything about himself. But while he was delirious he was always muttering something about money, money; money that he had lost and couldn't find, or money that he had found and couldn't lose. Then when we thought he couldn't possibly get well, Doctor Bertie and I ransacked his suit-cases for cards or letters or something that would tell us who he was and where he came from. _There wasn't the littlest thing!_"