“A letter for Mr. Howard,” replied the girl.
“A letter?” repeated Uncle Bob, with a shade of anxiety in his tones. “Why, it’s a telegram. Who in the world—”
He closed the door behind the girl, and stood with his eyes fastened on the envelope as if he hoped to find something there that would tell him where the dispatch came from and what it contained.
“Hand it over here and I will read it for you,” said Arthur, after he had waited until his patience was all exhausted.
His father probably did not hear the request, or, if he did, he paid no attention to it. He seated himself in the nearest chair and tore open the envelope with the most exasperating deliberation.
Like Micawber, he had long clung firmly to the hope that something would “turn up” in his favor—that the fickle goddess who had hitherto frowned upon him would change her frowns to smiles—and he little imagined how near he was to seeing his fond dream realized.
CHAPTER XVIII.
HOW THE OTHER WAS RECEIVED.
“By the piper that played before Moses!” exclaimed the telegraph operator at Bolton, when he had received and copied a message that had come over the wires all the way from some little place buried in the wilds of Arizona. “If that old villain, Bob Howard, hasn’t struck it rich this time, I am beat!”
Here the operator read the message over again to make sure that he had made no mistake in copying it, shaking his head and sighing deeply all the while, and then he put it into an envelope, which he handed over to a messenger boy who happened to enter the office at that moment.
“Wonders will never cease!” he added, as he walked up and down the office, with his hands buried deep in his pockets; “but this is a little ahead of anything I ever heard of, and it doesn’t seem possible. ‘And the whole of your deceased brother’s property, roughly estimated at—’ Whew! I wouldn’t give much for it by the time old Bob and that scapegrace son of his get through handling it. I guess that man out in Arizona couldn’t have known his brother as well as we in Bolton know him. I pity that nephew, whoever he is.”