Mr. Dumphy, with colourless cheeks, tried to laugh a reckless scornful laugh. "My wife is dead!"
"A mistake—Ged, sir!—a most miserable mistake. Understand me. I don't say that she hadn't ought to be! Ged, sir, from the look that that little blue-eyed hussy gave you an hour ago—there ain't much use of another woman around, but the fact is that she is living. You thought she was dead, and left her up there in the snow. She goes so far as to say—you know how these women talk, Dumphy; Ged, sir, they'll say anything when they get down on a man—she says it ain't your fault if she wasn't dead! Eh? Sho?"
"A message, sir, business of the Bank, very important," said Dumphy's servant, opening the door.
"Get out!" said Dumphy, with an oath.
"But, sir, they told me, sir"——
"Get out! will you?" roared Dumphy.
The door closed on his astonished face. "It's all—a—mistake," said Dumphy, when he had gone. "They died of starvation—all of them—while I was away hunting help. I've read the accounts."
Colonel Starbottle slowly drew from some vast moral elevation in his breast pocket a well-worn paper. It proved when open to be a faded, blackened, and be-thumbed document in Spanish. "Here is the report of the Commander of the Presidio who sent out the expedition. You read Spanish? Well. The bodies of all the other women were identified except your wife's. Hang it, my boy, don't you see why she was excepted? She wasn't there."
The Colonel darted a fat forefinger at his host and then drew back, and settled his purpled chin and wattled cheeks conclusively in his enormous shirt collar. Mr. Dumphy sank back in his chair at the contact as if the finger of Fate had touched him.