“The driver stole,” suggested Thatcher, so languidly that it could hardly be called an interruption.

“Well, we’ll say the driver stole, and passed over to you as his accomplice, confederate, or receiver, certain papers belonging—­”

“See here, Harlowe, I don’t feel like joking in a ghostly law office after midnight.  Here are your facts.  Yuba Bill, the driver, stole a bag from this passenger, Wiles, or Smiles, and handed it to me to insure the return of my own.  I found in it some papers concerning my case.  There they are.  Do with them what you like.”

Thatcher turned his eyes again abstractedly to the fire.

Harlowe took out the first paper: 

“A-w, this seems to be a telegram.  Yes, eh?  ’Come to Washington at once.—­Carmen de Haro.’”

Thatcher started, blushed like a girl, and hurriedly reached for the paper.

“Nonsense.  That’s a mistake.  A dispatch I mislaid in the envelope.”

“I see,” said the lawyer dryly.

“I thought I had torn it up,” continued Thatcher, after an awkward pause.  I regret to say that here that usually truthful man elaborated a fiction.  He had consulted it a dozen times a day on the journey, and it was quite worn in its enfoldings.  Harlowe’s quick eye had noticed this, but he speedily became interested and absorbed in the other papers.  Thatcher lapsed into contemplation of the fire.

“Well,” said Harlowe, finally turning to his client, “here’s enough to unseat Gashwiler, or close his mouth.  As to the rest, it’s good reading—­but I needn’t tell you—­no legal evidence.  But it’s proof enough to stop them from ever trying it again,—­when the existence of this record is made known.  Bribery is a hard thing to fix on a man; the only witness is naturally particeps criminis;—­but it would not be easy for them to explain away this rascal’s record.  One or two things I don’t understand:  What’s this opposite the Hon. X’s name, ’Took the medicine nicely, and feels better?’ and here, just in the margin, after Y’s, ‘Must be labored with?’”

“I suppose our California slang borrows largely from the medical and spiritual profession,” returned Thatcher.  “But isn’t it odd that a man should keep a conscientious record of his own villainy?”

Harlowe, a little abashed at his want of knowledge of American metaphor, now felt himself at home.  “Well, no.  It’s not unusual.  In one of those books yonder there is the record of a case where a man, who had committed a series of nameless atrocities, extending over a period of years, absolutely kept a memorandum of them in his pocket diary.  It was produced in Court.  Why, my dear fellow, one half our business arises from the fact that men and women are in the habit of keeping letters and documents that they might—­I don’t say, you know, that they ought, that’s a question of sentiment or ethics—­but that they might destroy.”

Thatcher half-mechanically took the telegram of poor Carmen and threw it in the fire.  Harlowe noticed the act and smiled.