Captain Elisha stared straight before him, unseeingly, the color fading
from his cheeks. Then he put both elbows on the table and covered his
face with his hands.
"You see, Captain," said Sylvester, gently, "how very serious the
situation is. Graves has put it bluntly, but what he says is literally
true. If your brother had deliberately planned to hand his children over
to the mercy of that missing stockholder, he couldn't have done it more
completely."
Slowly the captain raised his head. His expression was a strange one;
agitated and shocked, but with a curious look of relief, almost of
triumph.
"At last!" he said, solemnly. "At last! Now it's ALL plain!"
"All?" repeated Sylvester. "You mean--?"
"I mean everything, all that's been puzzlin' me and troublin' my head
since the very beginnin'. All of it! NOW I know why! Oh, 'Bije! 'Bije!
'Bije!"
Kuhn spoke quickly.
"Captain," he said, "I believe you know who the owner of that one
hundred shares is. Do you?"
Captain Elisha gravely nodded.
"Yes," he answered. "I know him."
"What?"
"You do?"
"Who is it?"
The questions were blurted out together. The captain looked at the three
excited faces. He hesitated and then, taking the stub of a pencil from
his pocket, drew toward him a memorandum pad lying on the table and
wrote a line upon the uppermost sheet.
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