Pape laughed into the snarled demand. “And why not accuse? I don’t like you and I don’t trust you. Miss Lauderdale’s unfinished business is safer in my hands than yours. You lie when you say that she has transferred it to you. She knows who is the better man. In case you’re not sure, I am ready to show.” “No readier than I, you weak fish out of water.” Harford’s voice shook into higher, harder notes. “You couldn’t very well call me a thief and a liar without showing. As I told you this morning you’ll have to answer to me if you raise any more of a row around Miss Lauderdale. When will you give me a chance to——” “Now?” Pape suggested. “You don’t mean here, before the girls, in a public place where the cops are likely——” “_Why not_?” So the Queer Questioner’s battle-cry! Lightly though he laughed, he was heavy with hate, again moved by that battleful mania which is the sanity of love. To him specific insults did not matter so much. The importance of the whys, wheres or whences grew all at once negligible. To have it out with the man who contested his claim to his woman—to bring him down just on general principles—to wring him and rend him and trample him, if need be, into acknowledgment of his supreme impertinence—that was his present task. A thought-flash of the moment before had thrown rays of suspicion several ways through Pape’s mind. Mills Harford knew of the Montana Gusher swindle, as indicated by his jibe of that morning about an “oil-stock shark.” Being a real-estater of considerable success, he might be a principal in that fraud. Certainly he did not seem the man to have been a victim. The idea that this “most prominent” suitor of Jane might be the leader of the anti-Lauderdales was suggested by his bold attempt to deter the girl from further investigation. That she herself considered him a friend was in itself significant. He could not better have covered in perpetrating an inimical act toward her than by first having won her confidence with flattery as expertly administered as though he were indeed one of those villainous “perfect lovers” with whom honest heroes have to cope on stage and screen. As an intimate of the household, Harford probably was in position to know the worth of the late eccentric’s buried “bone.” He might well have instigated that “inside” safe job at the Sturgis’ and been responsible for the trailing of the poke-bonnet lady to the East Sixty-third Street hide-out, this last particularly pointed by his later appearance there with his lawyer. And here in the glen, just as the out-croppings showed plain the way to treasure’s lead, he was ready to prevent Jane by force from continuing her park prospecting while the excavations were underway on the heights. All the circumstantials were suspicious.