“I’ll help you,” Florence offered, taking one of the draperies from her.
“Next time concentrate on your sewing instead of on the mystery man and those——” Peggy stopped talking abruptly on seeing Miss Prudence enter the room.
As soon as José came to the house that evening, Jo Ann slipped to the kitchen to ask him if he had seen the smuggler hanging around the mine.
At his reply that he had not, Jo Ann felt relieved till the next moment, when he added, “We have much trouble at the mine today. No get out much ore.” He went on to explain that the tram-car wrecked the previous day had torn up the track badly and that there had been trouble with some of the mine machinery.
“Have they found out who wrecked the car?” she asked.
“No. One man told me he saw Luis, a bad workman El Señor discharged last week, near the track before the wreck.” José shrugged his shoulders. “I do not know who did it. Maybe it was Luis—maybe it was the strange man you saw.”
“Why did Mr. Eldridge discharge this Luis?”
“He steal ore.”
As Miss Prudence entered the kitchen just then and sat down, Jo Ann could not question José further. She left the room wondering if after all she had not been wrong in her surmise about the smuggler’s having wrecked the car. He might have become alarmed after she and Florence had seen him and have left immediately. She certainly hoped that was the case.
By the time the girls had finished sewing, Jo Ann was thoroughly weary of staying in the house. “If I don’t get outside for a long horseback ride or a climb up the mountains today, I’ll go raving crazy,” she said.