"When the baby was two years old, Ralph Murdaugh died, after a long illness which ate up the little they had been able to save. His wife, destitute and unable to support the child in any other fashion, turned to her old profession; she became what was known as a song-and-dance artiste at a hall named for its owner, 'Jake's'.
"Two years later, the dance-hall burned and Violet Ashton, as she called herself once more, was lost in the holocaust. As a thoroughly good woman, she had always been held in the utmost esteem by the community, rough as it was, and the child, Willa, had become a great favorite, but on her mother's death the problem of caring for her arose. There were no women in the town of the proper character to be trusted with her future, and the camp was in a quandary.
"Among what might be called the shifting population, was a peripatetic—ah, gambler, who traveled under the sobriquet of 'Gentleman Geoff'. He had set up a shack where he operated a roulette-wheel and faro-bank, and was very much attached to the child. Can you not surmise the rest? He adopted her, without legal form, and took her with him on his wanderings."
"Then I—I——" Billie stammered, aghast. "I am not——"
"You are Willa Murdaugh."
"Holy Christopher!" Jim Baggott passed his hand across his dazed forehead, and then all three were silent for a space.
The girl sat as if in a dream, her face flushed, her eyes vacant and fixed, and North forebore to intrude upon her reverie. At length she roused herself and turned to him with quick decision.
"If I am what you say, you must know my age. How old am I?"
"Nineteen. You will be twenty on the sixth of January, next."
"And now," she drew a deep breath, "will you tell me, please, why you have taken the trouble to find me?"