“‘Queer thing this morning. The sun was shining on the children, and on grandma’s bonnet, but her face was as black as a nigger’s. I wonder if that was a warning to me to keep away. Gold, gold! How terrible is the lure for the yellow stuff. It gets into the blood, it eats into the heart. It’s a frightful disease.’”
“That checks up with what Mr. Petersen had me to write down, doesn’t it, Grace?” breathed Elfreda.
“Undoubtedly. He must refer to the same thing, but it doesn’t give us the least idea where the place is.”
“The man would be a fool to write a thing like that in a diary—to tell where and how. Anything else? There is something on the next page.”
“Yes,” answered Grace, turning the page and reading:
“‘Though I haven’t found it, I know pretty well where the mother lode is, but I’m afraid of it—afraid to look for it. I’m afraid the wealth I should find there would kill me just because of the responsibility of possessing it. Then again, what is there left in life after a man has got all he has dreamed of, and yearned for, and fought for, and worked for, up to that time? Nothing!’”
“What a philosopher!” marvelled Grace Harlowe.
“He is right, too,” agreed Miss Briggs. “Suppose we forget about it, also,” urged Elfreda. “I am tired of it.”
“J. Elfreda, if I didn’t know you so well, I should believe you are in love, you are so gloomy. Listen! Mr. Petersen probably has no one surviving him. He wished you to have what he had found. It was the request of a man about to pass out; it was a trust, Elfreda. One day someone, perhaps the very ones who tried to kill him, will stumble on the Lost Mine. I should say that the prospector’s request imposed a duty on you, my dear—a duty to go to the place he names, take possession of what you may find there and keep it for your own. You can’t expect to make a fortune practicing law, especially if you don’t do more practicing than you have done in the last few years. I fear these summer outings of ours have cost each of us something.”
Elfreda said she didn’t regret the loss of time. Her time was her own, and she had sufficient funds to enable her to take care of herself and the little daughter that she had adopted a few years before.