“Those two letters I never saw.”
“I shall be sorry for that,” broke in John Ainsworth, “if their loss will cause us delay, or you inconvenience.”
“The non-arrival of those two letters has made the third something of a riddle to me,” said the Chief. “But that being now solved, I think no further mischief has been or will be done.”
Then followed further explanations concerning the meeting of the two, and John Ainsworth’s fever, which, following his ocean voyage, made a delay in San Francisco necessary.
“It was a tedious illness to me;” said the Australian. “Short as it was, it seemed never-ending.”
And then, at the request of the Chief, John Ainsworth told his story: briefly, but with sufficient clearness.
“I was a young man,” he said, “and filled with the spirit of adventure, when I went West, taking my youthful wife with me. It was a hard life for a woman; but it was her wish to go and, indeed, I would have left her behind me very unwillingly. We prospered in the mining country. My wife enjoyed the novelty of our new life, and we began to gather about us the comforts of a home. Then little Lea was born.”
He paused a moment and sighed heavily.
“My wife was never well again. She drooped and faded. When Lea was six months old, she died, and I buried her at the foot of her favorite mountain. I put my baby into the care of one of the women of the settlement—it was the best I could do,—and I lived on as I might. But the place grew hateful to me. There was one man among the rest whose friendship I prized, and after the loss of my wife I clung to him as if he were of my own blood. His name was Arthur Pearson.”
Again the narrator paused, and the eyes of the two listeners instinctively sought each other.