But Browne indignantly protested his innocence.  It was clear, he insisted, that Mrs. Braman was mistaken, for why, in the name of common-sense, should he, a lawyer of standing, desire to forge Hubert’s name, particularly when he himself held an unrecorded deed of the same property, and could have executed a good conveyance to Levitan had the latter so desired.  Such a performance would have been utterly without an object.  But the lawyer was nervous, and his description of Hubert as “a wealthy mine owner from the West, who owned a great deal of property in New York, and had an office in the Flatiron Building,” did not ring convincingly in Mr. Hart’s ears.  The Assistant District Attorney called up the janitor of the building in question on the telephone.  But no such person had an office there.  Browne, much flustered, said the janitor was either a fool or a liar.  He had been at Hubert’s office that very morning.  He offered to go and find him in twenty minutes.  But Mr. Hart thought that the lawyer had better make his explanation before a magistrate, and caused his arrest and commitment on a charge of forgery.  Little did he suspect what an ingenious fraud was about to be unearthed.

The days went by and Browne stayed in the Tombs, unable to raise the heavy bail demanded, but no Hubert appeared.  Meantime the writer, to whom the case had been sent for trial, ordered a complete search of the title to the property, and in a week or so became possessed, to his amazement, of a most extraordinary and complicated collection of facts.

He discovered that the lot of land offered by Browne to Levitan, and standing in Hubert’s name, was originally part of the property owned by Ebbe Petersen, the unfortunate Swede who, with his family, had perished in the Geiser off Cape Sable in 1888.

The title search showed that practically all of the Petersen property had been conveyed by Mary A. Petersen to a person named Ignatius F. X. O’Rourke, by a deed, which purported to have been executed on June 27, 1888, about two weeks before the Petersens sailed for Copenhagen, and which was signed with Mrs. Petersen’s mark, but that this deed had not been recorded until July 3, 1899, eleven years after the loss of the Geiser.

The writer busied himself with finding some one who had known Mrs. Petersen, and by an odd coincidence discovered a woman living in the Bronx who had been an intimate friend and playmate of the little Petersen girl.  This witness, who was but a child when the incident had occurred, clearly recalled the fact that Ebbe Petersen had not decided to take his wife and daughter with him on the voyage until a few days before they sailed.  They had then invited her, the witness—­now a Mrs. Cantwell—­to go with them, but her mother had declined to allow her to do so.  Mrs. Petersen, moreover, according to Mrs. Cantwell, was a woman of education, who wrote a particularly fine hand.  Other papers were discovered executed at about the same time, signed by Mrs. Petersen with her full name.  It seemed inconceivable that she should have signed any deed, much less one of so much importance, with her mark, and, moreover, that she should have executed any such deed at all when her husband was on the spot to convey his own property.