She nodded, but the firm lips remained closed where the lips of another woman might have opened to repeat what had been said at the teller's wicket.
"Then, afterwards, on the boat, before you sent the letter, you talked with him. It was one evening, just at dusk, on the starboard promenade of the saloon-deck: he was comin' down from the pilot-house and you stopped him. That was when he told you what his name was on the steamboat's books, wasn't it?--what?"
She nodded again. "You know so much, it is surprising that you don't know it all, Mr. Broffin," she commented, with gentle sarcasm.
"The one thing I don't know is the thing you're goin' to tell me--his real name," he insisted. "That's what I've come here for."
In spite of her inexperience, which, in Mr. Broffin's field, was no less than total, Charlotte Farnham had imagination, and with it a womanly zest for the matching of wits with a man whose chief occupation was the measuring of his own wit against the subtle cleverness of criminals. Therefore she accepted the challenge.
"I did my whole duty at the time, Mr. Broffin," she demurred, with a touch of coldness in her voice. "If you were careless enough to let him escape you at St. Louis, you shouldn't come to me. I might say very justly that it was never any affair of mine."
Matthew Broffin's gifts were subtle only in his dealings with other men; but he was shrewd enough to know that his last and best chance with a woman lay in an appeal to her fears.
"I don't know what made you write this letter, in the first place," he said, taking the well-thumbed paper from his coat pocket; "but I know well enough now why you didn't sign it, and why you didn't put the man's real name in it. You--you and him--fixed it up between you so that you could say to yourself afterwards what you've just said to me--that you'd done your duty. But you haven't finished doin' your duty, yet. The law says----"
"I know very well what the law says," was her baffling rejoinder; "I have taken the trouble to find out since I came home. I am not hiding your criminal."
Broffin was trying to gain a little ease by tilting his chair. But the house wall was too close behind him.
"People will say that you are helpin' to hide him as long as you won't tell his real name--what?" he grated.