Meet me at the St. Charles here Friday afternoon. We can make a deal, if you bring fifteen hundred dollars cash—no checks. If I am not there, wait a day. Am going out of town and may be delayed. This is your last chance.
It was then Thursday. Lang spent part of that day with Eva as usual, mentioning casually that he was going out of town for half a day or so, and left for New Orleans late that night.
He established himself at the Hotel St. Charles, and was not disappointed to find Carroll not known there. All the next afternoon he spent within sight of the desk, or in his room, with instructions to have any caller sent up to him immediately; but he waited in vain. The evening was equally blank. Carroll had said he might be delayed, and Lang repressed impatience and growing doubt until the whole of the next day had passed. He spent that night with a feeling of being somehow taken in, but next morning he was given a note.
It had been brought in very early by a negro boy, was scribbled in pencil and bore no date nor address. It said:
Sorry to keep you waiting, have been delayed. Will meet you to-day sure. Hope you have brought the money.
C.
Reviving in hope, Lang waited all that Sunday, again in vain, and the morning brought neither message nor caller. Fuming with wrath, he left a curt and angry note for Carroll at the desk, and took the train back to Mobile, certain now that he had been maliciously played with.
At his hotel among his letters, he found one with the stamp of the Iberville, which had been personally left. He knew at once who had left it, and he tore it open with a sense of dream.
Dear Doctor Lang: Father is alive. I have just had a message from him at Colon. He was picked up by the ship that ran you down, and has been very ill. I am to join him at Panama. There is a ship from New Orleans to-morrow which I can catch if I hurry. I am so sorry not to have seen you. I tried everywhere to find you. I am too excited and overjoyed to write, but I will send you word from Panama. I took all the money out of the bank.
Yours most gratefully and joyfully,
Eva Morrison.
Emotion and haste were in every line of the shaky script. She had passed through New Orleans while he waited there. Lang put the letter in his pocket, glad, indeed, but with a crushing sense of finality.
She was gone, Carroll was gone; so far as he was concerned, the emerald treasure was gone. Life returned to its normal, blank and uninteresting outlines.