“That fellow Curly always was a liar,” he said.

Enoch shrugged his shoulders.  “You should be a good judge of liars, Brown.  Curly told me that Mr. Fowler was his brother-in-law’s partner.”

Fowler spoke, his face drawn.  “Spare me that story, Mr. Huntingdon, I beg of you.”

“Did you beg Brown to spare me?” demanded Enoch, sternly.

“Pshaw!” exclaimed Brown, “that is old stuff.  It couldn’t be proved that we had anything to do with it.”

“No?” queried Enoch.  “What would you say to my taking the fund left Judge Smith by Curly and employing a first-class lawyer and a detective to go on the trail of those mis-appropriated funds?” Brown did not answer and Enoch went on:  “Curly’s idea was to get even with Fowler.  It was, in fact, a type of mania with him.  He told me that for years he had been in possession of facts concerning certain doings of Brown and Fowler in Mexico, which if they were properly blazed across the country would utterly ruin both of them.  He wanted to put me in possession of those facts.”

Suddenly Fowler rose and went to stand at a window, his back to the group around the Secretary’s desk.  Enoch continued, clearly and firmly: 

“I could scarcely believe my good fortune.  Here was my chance to pay Brown in kind.”

“Did Curly give you the facts?” asked Brown, who had grown a little white around the mouth.

Enoch did not heed him.  “I asked Curly if the story was a reflection on these two men morally or financially.  He said, morally; that it was bad beyond words.  At this point I weakened and told him that I had no desire to display any man’s weakness in the market place.  And Curly laughed at me and asked me what mercy Fowler had shown his brother?  But still I could not make up my mind to take those facts from Curly.”

Mr. Brown eased back in his chair with a sneering smile.  Young Ames sat sickly pale, his mouth open.

“But when I left him,” the calm, rich voice went on, “I told him that he could write down the story and send it to my house in Washington.  Now the chances are that having drifted so many years without telling it, he would have drifted on indefinitely.  But fate intervened.  Curly went to the Mexican border.  Certain gentlemen have seen to it that the Mexican border is not safe.  Curly was shot and he made it his death-bed duty to dictate this delectable tale to a friend.  In due course of time, the document reached my house in Washington, and here it is!” He tapped the upper drawer of his desk.

There was utter silence in the room while Enoch lighted a cigarette.

“Have you told any one the er—­tale?” demanded Brown, hoarsely.  “I can prove that not a word of it is true!”

“Can you?” Enoch squared round on him.  “Are you willing to risk having the story told with the idea of disproving it, afterward?  Isn’t your system of scandal mongering built on the idea that mud once slung always leaves a stain in the public mind?  And Curly was an eye witness.  He is dead, but I do not believe all the other eye witnesses are dead.  At any rate—­”