“How old are they?” Ruth interrupted long enough to ask.
“Mary has just come of age,” returned the old gentleman. “She seems to be a sturdy, courageous young person, however, and from her letter to me it appears she is following in the footsteps of her father, and with her younger sister Ellen and with the help of three miners who were friends of her father, is trying to operate the mine herself.”
“Are the girls all alone—are they living alone?” asked Ruth breathlessly.
“Yes. But that it not the worst of it,” said Mr. Knowles. He sat up straight and his thin face flushed with indignation. “These two plucky children—for they are hardly more—have enemies, wicked conniving enemies, who are plotting to get the mining claim away from them.”
“Ah!” Ruth’s eyes were bright. “Then that at least seems to show one thing!”
“What?” asked the old gentleman, in a puzzled way.
“That there is real gold on the claim. Otherwise these enemies, whoever they are, would not be so anxious to get hold of it!”
“Yes, I have thought of that,” said Mr. Knowles, and he had never looked so pathetically helpless as at the moment when he made that admission. “But even though there is gold in the mine, that will do the girls little good if their enemies succeed in taking it away from them before I get there.
“And after all,” he added, with a pitiful shrug of his shoulders, “what can an old man like me do against such villains as these probably are? I know nothing of mines or of the laws of the Yukon country. A sorry protector the girls will find in me, I fear, even when I have reached them.”
Though Ruth tried to encourage the old gentleman and reassure him as well as she could, in her heart she was convinced that he had spoken very near the truth. An unworldly, gentle, dreaming old man, no matter how kind-hearted and desirous of serving, could probably avail little against the cold-blooded, hardened type of pioneer buccaneer who would deliberately attempt to wrest a lawful claim from two orphaned and defenseless girls.