Enoch sat erect.  Abbott flashed on the light.  “Mr. Ames insists on seeing you again, Mr. Huntingdon,” Charley spoke hesitatingly.

“Come in, Ames,” said Enoch, coldly.  “Abbott, see that this envelope is put in a safe place.”

Abbott left them alone.  Ames advanced to the desk, where he stood, his face eager.

“Mr. Secretary, you’ve been so decent.  You,—­you—­well, you’re such a man!  I—­I want to tell you something but I don’t know how you’ll take it.  The truth is, I believe that I could prove that Luigi’s mistress was not your mother!”

Enoch clutched his desk and his face turned to stone.  “Don’t you think you went far enough with that matter before?” he asked sternly.

Ames stumbled on, doggedly.  “This last trip out West I just thought I’d go down to Brown’s early stamping grounds and see what kind of a reputation he had there.  I was getting a little fed up on him and I thought it couldn’t hurt me to have a little something on him against a rainy day, as it were.  You see I never did know what this Curly Field stuff was, but it didn’t take me long to run that story down, even if it was a generation old.  Of course, I don’t know what Curly told you, but certainly the official reports of the Field scandal never proved anything on either Brown or Fowler.”

Enoch moved impatiently.  But young Ames, standing rigidly before his desk exclaimed, “Just a moment longer, please, Mr. Secretary!  Some of these facts you know unless Field was so obsessed with the thought of his brother’s alleged wrongs that he did not mention them, but I’ll state them anyhow.  The mining and smelting property that caused the whole row was originally owned by an old timer named Post who struck it rich late in life, married and died soon after, leaving everything to his son, a little chap named Arthur.  This is the child Field was supposed to have robbed.  Little Arthur died a couple of years after Field’s suicide but by that time there was nothing left of the property and no one paid any attention to the child’s death.  But in reading old Post’s will, something piqued my curiosity.  In the event of Arthur’s death, the property was to go to old Post’s baby nephew, Huntingdon Post.”

Enoch knit his brows quickly but he did not speak and Ames went on, “Being, of course, in a suspicious state of mind, it struck me as an unusual coincidence that this child should have died, too.  So I made some inquiries.  It was difficult to trace the facts because there were no relatives.  Old Post seemed to have been just a solitary prowler, coming from nowhere, like so many of the old timers.  But finally, I found an old fellow in the back country who had known old Post.  He told me that little Hunt Post, as he called him, had been killed with his father and mother in a railway accident.  I asked where they got the child’s name and he said the mother’s name was Huntingdon.  He knew her when she was a girl living alone with her father in the Kanab country, north of the Grand Canyon.  He said her father died when she was ten or eleven and a family named Smith sort of brought her up and she was known as Mary Smith.  But when she married, she named the boy after her father who was a raw boned, red headed man named Enoch Huntingdon.”