“It is in Marshall’s hand and signature,” said my father, and old Gaeki, nodded, wrinkling his face under his shaggy eyebrows.  He went away still wagging his grizzled head, wrote a memorandum on an envelope from his pocket, and sat down in, his chair.

My father turned now to young Marshall.

“My boy,” he said, “why do you say that some one has deceived you?”

“Because, sir,” replied the lad, “my father was to leave me twenty thousand dollars.  That was his plan.  Thirty thousand dollars should be set aside for Mr. Gosford, and the remainder turned over to me.”

“That would be thirty thousand dollars to Mr. Gosford, instead of fifty,” said my father.

“Yes, sir,” replied the boy; “that is the way my father said he would write his will.  But it was not written that way.  It is fifty thousand dollars to Mr. Gosford, and the remainder to me.  If it were thirty thousand dollars to Mr. Gosford, as my father, said his will would be, that would have left me twenty thousand dollars from the estate; but giving Mr. Gosford fifty thousand dollars leaves me nothing.”

“And so you adventured on a little larceny,” sneered the Englishman.

The boy stood very straight and white.

“I do not understand this thing,” he said, “but I do not believe that my father would deceive me.  He never did deceive me in his life.  I may have been a disappointment to him, but my father was a gentle man.”  His voice went up strong and clear.  “And I refuse to believe that he would tell me one thing and do another!”

One could not fail to be impressed, or to believe that the boy spoke the truth.

“We are sorry,” said Lewis, “but the will is valid and we cannot go behind it.”

My father walked about the room, his face in reflection.  Gosford sat at his ease, transcribing a note on his portfolio.  Old Gaeki had gone back to his chair and to his little case of bottles; he got them up on his knees, as though he would be diverted by fingering the tools of his profession.  Lewis was in plain distress, for he held the law and its disposition to be inviolable; the boy stood with a find defiance, ennobled by the trust in his father’s honor.  One could not take his stratagem for a criminal act; he was only a child, for all his twenty years of life.  And yet Lewis saw the elements of crime, and he knew that Gosford was writing down the evidence.

It was my father who broke the silence.

“Gosford,” he said, “what scheme were you and Marshall about?”

“You may wonder, sir,” replied the Englishman, continuing to write at his notes; “I shall not tell you.”

“But I will tell you,” said the boy.  “My father thought that the states in this republic could not hold together very much longer.  He believed that the country would divide, and the South set up a separate government.  He hoped this might come about without a war.  He was in horror of a war.  He had traveled; he had seen nations and read their history, and he knew what civil wars were.  I have heard him say that men did not realize what they were talking when they urged war.”