“Oh, and so your friend is dead!” said Ruth, in a hushed voice. “And the girls—how about them?”
“It was about them that Maurice wrote me just before his death,” replied Mr. Knowles. It was plain from the emotion in his voice that he and Maurice Chase had been very good friends indeed. “He had located a mine, he said——”
“Gold?” interrupted Ruth eagerly, leaning forward in her steamer chair.
“He thought there was gold,” said the old man soberly. “And that one thought helped him,” his voice trailed off almost to a whisper, “to die happy!”
CHAPTER XIV
KNOCKOUT INN
“Wasn’t there gold in Mr. Chase’s mine after all?” asked Ruth eagerly.
Mr. Knowles looked troubled and rubbed a blue-veined hand across his forehead.
“That’s what I don’t know and what I have come all this way to find out,” he confessed.
He relapsed into one of his thoughtful pauses, and eager as Ruth was to hear the rest of this remarkable story she did not hurry him. She knew that eventually he would tell her everything, for he was even more eager to disclose the facts than she was to hear them.
“Mary herself wrote to me,” he said, after a moment. “She wrote to tell me of her father’s death and the fact that she and her sister Ellen were in desperate trouble.”