"I will go to the ball, sir, since you wish it."
"Very well. That will do. Now leave the room. I wish to read the morning papers."
Cora went out to find her grandmother and to relieve the lady's anxiety; old Aaron Rockharrt threw himself back in his arm chair with grim satisfaction at having conquered Cora and set his iron heel upon her neck. Yes; he had conquered Cora through her love for her poor, timid, abused grandmother. But now Fate was to conquer him.
But Fate had decided that Cora should not attend that ball, or any other place of amusement, for a long time. And he was just on the brink of discovering the impertinent interference of Fate in human affairs, and especially those of the Iron King.
He took up a Washington paper—a government organ—and read, opening his eyes to their widest extent as he read the following head-lines:
A MYSTERY CLEARED UP.
THE FATE OF GOVERNOR REGULAS ROTHSAY.
Killed by the Comanches on November 1st.
A dispatch from Fort Security to the Indian Bureau, received this morning, announces another inroad of the Comanches upon the new settlement of Terrepeur, in which the inhabitants were massacred and their dwellings burned. Among the victims who perished in the flames in their own huts was Regulas Rothsay, late Governor-elect of ——, and at the time of his death a volunteer missionary to this treacherous and bloodthirsty tribe.
Another man, under the circumstances, might have been unnerved by such sudden and awful news, and let fall the paper, but not the Iron King. He grasped it only with a firmer hand, and read it again with keener eyes.