“Then there was that big deal in Rocky Mountain coal land, and all those other deals which you so readily remember. The whole of it amounts to eight hundred thousand dollars, and I should make it two millions if I wasn’t afraid of the courts. Sometimes a man’s desire to suddenly enrich himself bumps him up against the courts, and he loses all that he hoped to gain and more, too. Your son Frank is a fighter!”
These last remarks seemed to be directed to himself and not to Merriwell, and Merriwell appeared not to hear them.
Santenel slowly pushed the prepared notes across the table and reached out the pen to Merriwell, the latter taking it without hesitation.
“You will sign these notes; after which you will prepare a written statement of the reasons which led you to take a sudden departure from this earthly sphere!”
Merriwell drew the notes to him, not noticing that they were drawn payable to another name than that of “Fisher Stokes,” and, dipping the pen in the ink-well, he proceeded to append his name.
Santenel dried the ink of the signatures with a blotter and placed the notes in a little heap on the marble table. Then he shoved a sheet of paper to Merriwell and commanded him to write.
“This is what you are to say,” commanded Santenel, and Charles Conrad Merriwell set his pen to the paper:
“To my son Frank.
“Dear Frank: The only regret I have is in leaving you, for I know that you love me and that you will be shocked and grieved at my death, the death of a suicide. But life has become unbearable to me. I can stand it no longer. I have studiously concealed this from you, though I fear sometimes that you have read it in my face. I am in good mental health; but I have ceased to have any desire to live. You have sometimes noticed idiosyncrasies in me. The attempt to hide from you my real feelings and my heart-sickness of the world will go far toward explaining them. I hope that my body will not be cast up by the waves, and that if it should be, it may lie unburied, though this last I know you will not permit. Pay all my debts. I have some notes outstanding, among others some heavy ones occasioned by wildcat mining speculation. These I must ask you to meet. The rest of my fortune is yours. So good-by; don’t think too hard of me, and do not grieve, for I am not worthy of it.
“Your unfortunate father,