less apt to be overheard, "they're gone. Mr. Wing found them and, realising the alarm it would be to you to know that they were found, did not tell you. It was those papers that brought about his death."
When Mrs. Parlin was sufficiently calm, Trafford set himself to the task of extracting the details of the affair; letting her at first tell it in her own way, and later asking questions that completed the story. Condensed to the facts, it ran as follows:
Nearly twelve years before, her husband, in the course of some investigation of a land title in the Public Lands Office, came across what appeared an error in an important entry. He was on the point of calling attention to it, so that it could be corrected, when a critical examination convinced him that it was not a mere error, but a carefully made change that involved the title to timber-land that was just becoming exceedingly valuable. Acting on the hint thus given, he went to work cautiously, but determinately, and personally got together a number of documents that revealed what seemed a systematic series of forgeries, relating to immense tracts of land that were formerly public. In some cases, the
