For there was danger there, too--grim and imminent--and sentences
in Ella's hasty letter that bore now to his new knowledge a deep
significance she had not dreamed of.
As when a flash of lightning lights all the landscape up and shows
the traveller dreadful dangers that beset his path, so a wave of
intuition told Dunn clearly the whole conspiracy; so that he saw
it all, and saw how every detail was to be fitted in together. His
father, General Dunsmore, was to be murdered first at the Brook
Bourne Spring, to which he was being lured; and afterwards, when
Dunn arrived, he was to be murdered, too. And on him, dead and
unable to defend himself, the blame of his father's death would be
laid. It would not be difficult to manage. Walter would arrange
it all as neatly as he had been accustomed to arrange the Dunsmore
business affairs placed in his hands for settlement.
A forged letter or two, Dunn's own revolver used to shoot the old
man with and then placed in Dunn's dead hand when his own turn had
come, convincing detail like that would be easy to arrange. Why,
the very fact of his disguise, the tangled beard that he had grown
to hide his features with, would appear conclusive. Any coroner's
jury would return a verdict of wilful murder against his memory on
that one fact alone.
Walter would see to that all right. A little false evidence
apparently reluctantly given would be added, and all would be
kneaded together into the one substance till the whole guilt of
all that happened would appear to lie solely on his shoulders.
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