[OpenJades-developer] He still held--I wasn't so anxious about it: thank Heave

[Rehmeier <re...@no...>]

Er motherhood would soon have to be put away in camphor again. The next
day, by degrees, I got the whole story. Paul Armstrong had a besetting
evil--the love of money. Common enough, but he loved money, not for what
it would buy, but for its own sake. An examination of the books showed
no irregularities in the past year since John had been cashier, but
before that, in the time of Anderson, the old cashier, who had died,
much strange juggling had been done with the records. The railroad in
New Mexico had apparently drained the banker's private fortune, and he
determined to retrieve it by one stroke. This was nothing less than the
looting of the bank's securities, turning them into money, and making
his escape. But the law has long arms. Paul Armstrong evidently studied
the situation carefully. Just as the only good Indian is a dead Indian,
so the only safe defaulter is a dead defaulter. He decided to die, to
all appearances, and when the hue and cry subsided, he would be able to
enjoy his money almost anywhere he wished. The first necessity was an
accomplice. The connivance of Doctor Walker was suggested by his love
for Louise. The man was unscrupulous, and with the girl as a bait, Paul
Armstrong soon had him fast. The plan was apparently the acme of
simplicity: a small town in the west, an attack of heart disease, a body
from a medical college dissecting-room shipped in a trunk to Doctor
Walker by a colleague in San Francisco, and palmed off for the supposed
dead banker. What was simpler? The woman, Nina Carrington, was the cog
that slipped. What she only suspected, what she really knew, we never
learned. She was a chambermaid in the hotel at C--