“Some servant told, I suppose, and got a dollar for the item. It’s the small bone of her right arm—she was staying with poor uncle Robert, and she had a fall—somehow,” added Ralston, vaguely. “She must have been there when he died. It was awfully sudden at the end. I saw him yesterday afternoon. He seemed pretty strong. I went this morning to enquire about cousin Katharine—they say he died very peacefully. Failure of the heart, you know.”
Bright nodded thoughtfully, as he leaned one elbow upon Ralston’s desk.
“What sort of a will is it going to turn out?” he asked, after a moment’s pause.
“I haven’t the slightest idea,” answered John, with perfect truth.
“It would be a good thing for you if he had died intestate. Your mother and old Alexander are the next of kin. They’d get something in the neighbourhood of thirty or forty millions apiece. You’d give up clerking, Jack.”
“I don’t know, I’m sure. If I were ever to have much money, a year in a bank wouldn’t do me any harm. But I’m not likely to stay here. Cousin Alexander’s a good enemy to me. He’s been telling Mr. Beman that I drink, and that sort of thing, and Mr. Beman has requested me to leave on the first of the month.”
“You don’t mean that?” Hamilton Bright’s fair Saxon face reddened in sudden anger for his friend.
“Of course I do.”
Ralston told him exactly what had happened, and by the time he had finished, Alexander Lauderdale Junior had another enemy, and a dangerous one. Had Bright known all, and especially that Katharine owed her broken arm to her father’s violence, something unexpected might have happened. Bright had for Katharine all the Quixotic devotion which a pure and totally unrequited love can inspire in a perfectly simple disposition, which has been brought into rather close contact with the uncompromising code of such a region as the Nacimiento Valley.
“And you wish to stay in the bank?” asked Bright, quietly, at last.