Here was matter of interest to John Sheldon. That such a clipping should be found upon the wall of a log cabin in the Sasnokee-keewan in itself set him musing. But as he stood looking at it other thoughts, more closely connected with the matter in his mind, suggested themselves. Perhaps the madman had also been a scientist, an entomologist, hence a man of education. That would explain how it came about that Paula spoke an English which was not that of a rough miner.
But another chance discovery brought Sheldon closer to the truth. The cupboard door was open. In plain sight upon a low shelf was a thick volume. Sheldon took it up. It was an abstrusely technical treatise upon butterflies by Charles Francis Hamilton, Ph.D., and was dedicated:
TO MY DEAR WIFE PAULA
“Good Lord!” muttered Sheldon.
To be sure there might have been no end of explanations beside the one which presented itself to him first. But here was a tenable theory, one to which he clung rather more eagerly than he as yet understood.
The madman was no other than Charles Francis Hamilton, entomologist of note about 1860. Not only had the man not always been mad, but at one time had a brilliant mind. He had come into the unknown parts of the great Northwest, so much of which is still unknown to-day, even though men have made roads through it. And there he had lost his sanity.
One could conceive of some terrible illness which had broken the man and twisted his brain hideously, or of an accident from which merely the physical part of him had recuperated, or of some terrible experience such as is no stranger in the wilderness, hardship on top of hardship, starvation, perhaps, when a man is lost and bewildered, some shock which would unseat the reason.
Somewhere he had found Paula. It might be as she herself said, that he was her father; that he had brought her, a little girl, into the mining country. Or it was quite as conceivable that he had “acquired” some little motherless, fatherless waif, no blood kin to him, and had reared her as his own daughter, naming her “Paula.” In any case, it was made clear why she did not use the speech of the illiterate.
And it was equally obvious that the girl might be sane.
“Of course she is!” said Sheldon, disgusted with himself for his perfectly natural suspicions. “What girl raised in a place like this all her life by a madman wouldn’t be a trifle—different?”