Keith gave a gasp of incredulity.  He looked again to see that his eyes were not tricking him.  And it was there in cold, implacable print.  Derwent Conniston—­that phoenix among men, by whom he had come to measure all other men, that Crichton of nerve, of calm and audacious courage, of splendid poise—­a burglar!  It was cheap, farcical, an impossible absurdity.  Had it been murder, high treason, defiance of some great law, a great crime inspired by a great passion or a great ideal, but it was burglary, brigandage of the cheapest and most commonplace variety, a sneaking night-coward’s plagiarism of real adventure and real crime.  It was impossible.  Keith gritted the words aloud.  He might have accepted Conniston as a Dick Turpin, a Claude Duval or a Macheath, but not as a Jeremy Diddler or a Bill Sykes.  The printed lines were lies.  They must be.  Derwent Conniston might have killed a dozen men, but he had never cracked a safe.  To think it was to think the inconceivable.

He turned to the letters.  They were postmarked Darlington, England.  His fingers tingled as he opened the first.  It was as he had expected, as he had hoped.  They were from Mary Josephine.  He arranged them—­nine in all—­in the sequence of their dates, which ran back nearly eight years.  All of them had been written within a period of eleven months.  They were as legible as print.  And as he passed from the first to the second, and from the second to the third, and then read on into the others, he forgot there was such a thing as time and that Mary Josephine was waiting for him.  The clippings had told him one thing; here, like bits of driftage to be put together, a line in this place and half a dozen in that, in paragraphs that enlightened and in others that puzzled, was the other side of the story, a growing thing that rose up out of mystery and doubt in segments and fractions of segments adding themselves together piecemeal, welding the whole into form and substance, until there rode through Keith’s veins a wild thrill of exultation and triumph.

And then he came to the ninth and last letter.  It was in a different handwriting, brief, with a deadly specificness about it that gripped Keith as he read.

This ninth letter he held in his hand as he rose from the table, and out of his mouth there fell, unconsciously, Conniston’s own words, “It’s devilish queer, old top—­and funny!”

There was no humor in the way he spoke them.  His voice was hard, his eyes dully ablaze.  He was looking back into that swirling, unutterable loneliness of the northland, and he was seeing Conniston again.

Fiercely he caught up the clippings, struck a match, and with a grim smile watched them as they curled up into flame and crumbled into ash.  What a lie was life, what a malformed thing was justice, what a monster of iniquity the man-fabricated thing called law!

And again he found himself speaking, as if the dead Englishman himself were repeating the words, “It’s devilish queer, old top—­and funny!”