Howard stopped here, filled his pipe again and looked at me appealingly, apparently waiting for me to arrive at the true significance of his quiet statement of fact.
"Ramund, Ramund, you don't mean to say----" And then, as though shot between the eyes, I recalled the same name and the peculiar cultivated inflection given it by Norma Byng some twelve years before. Now the cause of his extreme interest and agitation when we were examining the prisoners a few days before rushed upon me like Niagara. I could still hear Byng's cut--"It is a lie, his name is Ramund--a damned Prussian!" It was strange I did not remember the name then, especially as both times it had been connected with a foreign banking house.
"Yes--yes," said Howard, taking his pipe down and looking out of the cabin door reflectively, "don't you think I have made some progress to be able to even talk about it now without becoming insane? I am trying to tell you of a snake that has crawled across my path twice to destroy me. You know that don't happen often. I should have killed him the first time. I would have done it had it not been for one thing. I can think of it now--but I never dared to before. I couldn't tell anyone but you, even now! You seem to support me."
He stopped, puzzled by the expression on my face as the details of my meeting with Norma Byng, his wife, years before, rushed through my mind, and the dreadful sadness with which she told me of the same occurrence. Her simple story impressed me with added force after the lapse of time. By gesture I asked him to proceed. The fact was I could see valuable evidence for the Government, too, in the circumstances.
"As I said before," he continued slowly, "I had an opportunity and would have killed him, if he had not been secretly encouraged. I can see now I was all but insane when they not only took our properties, confiscating even my private account, leaving me without a cent, but I had to sell my household effects to live. Then Mrs. Potter started on another diabolical course. She deliberately undertook to sell my beautiful wife to the Prussian--and was making headway before I noticed it. It took me a long time to realize it and I was sure of it before I acted. I went down to Georgia to get old Don, the only man I ever entrusted with the full details of how the turpentine and rosin could be taken from a stump, bringing him back to New York with me.