Hester, starting up, listened in frank bewilderment, but the expression on John Herrick’s face was quite different. Her tale was none too plain, but he seemed to guess, long before she had finished, what it was she was trying to say.
“Tell me,” he said at last when she paused; “tell me one thing.” Her heart sank, for his eyes were hard and his tone was harsh and dry. “Why did you come here? Was it to warn me, so that I could go away?”
“Oh, no, no,” she gasped, still breathless and incoherent. “I only felt that you ought to know what harm I had done. I wanted you to be ready to explain to the men when they came that it was I who had——”
“Do you mean,” he interrupted her, leaning forward in his chair, his eyes fixed on her with a strange, intense eagerness; “do you mean that you do not believe as they do? That you don’t suspect me of stealing that money?”
The blank astonishment on Beatrice’s face was answer enough.
“It wouldn’t be possible!” she declared simply.
He leaned back, and put his hand over his face as though suddenly weary.
“God bless you, Beatrice,” he said. “I will remember that always, that you believed in me.”
He rose slowly, limped across the room, and opened the door of a safe, let into the wall between two bookcases. He brought out two steel boxes, and set them on the table.
“Now go and open the doors,” he said, “so that when our friends arrive, they can come in at once.”
While he unlocked the boxes, Hester went to do as he had directed; but Beatrice, wondering and fascinated, could not leave his side. The first lid that he lifted showed bundles of bank-notes, and the second, shining piles of heavy gold pieces.
“Yes, this is the money that was missing,” he said.
For a little time there was no sound in the big room as Beatrice stood gazing in open-mouthed astonishment at the piles of gold and silver pieces heaped upon the table, while Hester stood at the outer door to listen. The night sounds of the mountain came in: the wind among the trees, the squeaking of a bat, the far-off yelp of a coyote. Presently, however, these faint noises were drowned in another, distant but growing nearer and louder, the angry voices of excited men and the tramp of feet upon the road.