There was the glint of a gold piece at the bottom of the bag. Dud flushed and reached out his hand for it.
“That five dollars, Miss Helen. Thank you. I shall never spend this coin,” declared Dud, earnestly. “And I shall take it to a jeweler’s and have it properly engraved.”
“What will you have put on it?” asked Helen, laughing.
He looked at her from under level brows, smiling yet quite serious.
“I shall have engraved on it ‘Snuggy, to Dud’—if I may?” he said.
But Helen shook her head and although she still smiled, she said:
“You’d better wait a bit, Mr. Lawyer, and see if your advice brings about any happy conclusion of my trouble. But you can keep the gold piece, just the same, to remember me by.”
“As though I needed that reminder!” he cried.
Jess removed the corner of the napkin from between her pretty teeth. “Get busy, do!” she cried. “I’m dying to hear about this strange affair you say you have come East to straighten out, Helen.”
So the girl from Sunset Ranch told all her story. Everything her father had said to her upon the topic before his death, and all she suspected about Fenwick Grimes and Allen Chesterton—even to the attitude Uncle Starkweather took in the matter—she placed before Dud Stone.