"Indeed!" said Dr. Jim, looking surprised. Robin also shared his astonishment, and expressed it.
"Why, Santiago you did not tell me you knew Herrick!" said he, as they took their seats at table.
"Did I not?" replied the Don carelessly. "Ah! that was no doubt because his name was never mentioned between us. But if I am not mistaken," said he addressing himself directly to Jim, "you were concerned in that strange case of my friend Colonel Carr."
Herrick almost bounded from his seat. That here of all places and in so unexpected a way, he should meet with a stranger who knew Carr, was like fiction. Had the incident occurred in a novel, he would have put it down as a freak of imagination on the author's part. Yet the thing had happened in real life and to himself. "Was Carr a friend of yours?" he asked.
"Twelve years and more ago," replied Santiago quietly, "we knew one another intimately in Mexico."
"Mexico!" muttered Herrick, recalling what Bess had said about Frisco's tales of North and South America, "not in Peru?"
"We went to Peru together--on an expedition."
"What sort of an expedition?" asked Joyce eagerly.
"To make our fortunes. That is the sort of expedition we all are bound to undertake."
Herrick thought of Colonel Carr's money. Was he on the point of learning sufficient of the man's wild life in the Americas, to reveal what his secret was? "Did you succeed?" he asked.