Page:Fifty Candles (1926).djvu/132

 “Very interesting, Mr. Drew,” said the detective. “But it gets us nowhere—nowhere at all. It establishes beyond question that Hung was under an obligation to your father, that he was always very devoted to him”

“Yes,” said Mark Drew sharply. “But you forget that the obligation has been paid. To-day Hung was released from his promise—he was a free man again. What has been going on in his mind these twenty years? You and I don’t know—we can’t know. What white man could?”

“You mean to say,” Doctor Parker put in, with what seemed to me a quite hopeful look in his eyes, “that you think Hung’s first act as a free man was to murder his benefactor?”

“There’s a bare chance of it,” Drew replied. He turned again to the detective. “After all, there is a very thin line dividing gratitude and hate. If you saved my life to-night I should be grate- Rh