"You are after that reward, I observe. Well, you won't get it. Like many others of your class you can follow a trail, but the insight to start right and to end in triumphant success is given only to a genius, and you are not a genius."
With a blush I could not control, I advanced upon him, crying:
"You have forestalled me. You have telegraphed or telephoned to Mr. Atwater—"
"I have not left my house since I came in here three hours ago."
"Then—" I began.
But he hushed me with a look.
"It is not a matter of money," he declared almost with dignity. "Those who think to reap dollars from the distress which has come upon the Ocumpaugh family will eat ashes for their pains. Money will be spent, but none of it earned, unless you, or such as you, are hired at so much an hour to—follow trails."
Greatly astounded not only by the attitude he took, but by the calm and almost indifferent way in which he mentioned what I had every reason to believe to be the one burning object of his existence, I surveyed him with undisguised astonishment till another thought, growing out of the silence of the many-roomed house above us, gripped me with secret dread; and I exclaimed aloud and without any attempt at subterfuge:
"She is dead, then! the child is dead!"
"I do not know," was his reply.