“He was Lute’s father,” Aunt Mildred supplemented. “Lute took our name. She never saw him. He died when she was a few weeks old. He was my brother.”
“Remarkable, most remarkable.” Mrs. Grantly was revolving the message in her mind. “There were two attempts on Mr. Dunbar’s life. The subconscious mind cannot explain that, for none of us knew of the accident to-day.”
“I knew,” Chris answered, “and it was I that operated Planchette. The explanation is simple.”
“But the handwriting,” interposed Mr. Barton. “What you wrote and what Mrs. Grantly wrote are identical.”
Chris bent over and compared the handwriting.
“Besides,” Mrs. Grantly cried, “Mr. Story recognizes the handwriting.”
She looked at him for verification.
He nodded his head. “Yes, it is Dick’s fist. I’ll swear to that.”
But to Lute had come a visioning. While the rest argued pro and con and the air was filled with phrases,—“psychic phenomena,” “self-hypnotism,” “residuum of unexplained truth,” and “spiritism,”—she was reviving mentally the girlhood pictures she had conjured of this soldier-father she had never seen. She possessed his sword, there were several old-fashioned daguerreotypes, there was much that had been said of him, stories told of him—and all this had constituted the material out of which she had builded him in her childhood fancy.
“There is the possibility of one mind unconsciously suggesting to another mind,” Mrs. Grantly was saying; but through Lute’s mind was trooping her father on his great roan war-horse. Now he was leading his men. She saw him on lonely scouts, or in the midst of the yelling Indians at Salt Meadows, when of his command he returned with one man in ten. And in the picture she had of him, in the physical semblance she had made of him, was reflected his spiritual nature, reflected by her worshipful artistry in form and feature and expression—his bravery, his quick temper, his impulsive championship, his madness of wrath in a righteous cause, his warm generosity and swift forgiveness, and his chivalry that epitomized codes and ideals primitive as the days of knighthood. And first, last, and always, dominating all, she saw in the face of him the hot passion and quickness of deed that had earned for him the name “Fighting Dick Curtis.”