Crane saw all this with fierce satisfaction. He had planned this sudden
accusation with subtle forethought. It even gave him relief to feel his
suffering shifted to another; he was no longer the assailed by evil
fortune, he was the assailant. Already the sustaining force of right
was on his side; what a dreadful thing it was to squirm and shrink in
the toils of crime. A thought that he might have been like this had he
allowed Mortimer to stand accused flashed through his mind. He waited
for his victim to speak.
At last Cass found strength to say: "Mr. Crane, this is a terrible
accusation; there is some dreadful mistake--I did not--"
The other interrupted him. The man's defense must be so abjectly
hopeless, such a cowardly weak string of lies, that out of pity, as he
might have ceased to beat a hound, Crane continued, speaking rapidly,
holding the guilty man tight in the grasp of his fierce denunciation.
"You stole that note. You sent it, with a quick-delivery stamp to your
brother, Billy Cass, in New York, and he bet it for you on my horse, The
Dutchman, on the 13th, and lost it. Mortimer, thinking that Alan Porter
had taken the money, replaced it, and you nearly committed a greater
crime than stealing when you allowed him to be dishonored, allowed him
to be accused and all but convicted of your foolish sin.
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