“Laws-a-me!” burst out Mrs. Doane, looking at us in turn with her big eyes. “What does he mean?—that I talk too much?”
Poppy grinned, but didn’t answer.
“Again taken to my bed,” the millionaire wrote, shortly before his death, “I have repeatedly tried to get in touch with my granddaughter, through Alonzo Chew, my lawyer, but she pays no attention to my letters and telegrams. Is this the work of her mother? I have tried to believe so. Yet the child, with a mind of her own, found a way of coming here last summer. So common sense tells me that she could write to me if she wished. Can it be true, as Chew says, that all she came for a year ago was to fawn on a senile old man and thus insure her heritage? She wants my money, he says, and getting it, less than ever will she want to come to this isolated home of mine. Chew is wiring her again to-day, that I am on my deathbed, and that may bring her. We had another long talk when he was here about those poor people in the religious colony by the river. I was surprised at his deep interest in them, and his evident desire to help them to happier homes and more productive surroundings. Rather than have my wealth dissipated by a thankless younger relative, how much finer, he has urged, that I might invest it in the lives of these deserving people. I could do for them, on their rather barren land, what I had done for myself here. And the result, in their greater happiness and added prosperity, would be a lasting monument to my memory. I find myself so easily led on by Chew, that I wonder at times, and anxiously, if my mind is inhabited by its usual keenness.... To think that I should even consider disinheriting my own grandchild!”
A skip of two days.
“Still not a line from Ruth. And this indifference of hers, so heart-breaking to me, has led to the making of a new will, though it isn’t the will that Chew tried to urge on me. But I cannot bring myself to disinherit my kin outright. Maybe, when I am gone, Ruth will be filled with remorse over her present conduct. And how tragic then that my fortune should have passed into strange hands! No, I have let the disposition of my property stand for a year. And I can only hope that my grandchild, in getting the keys of my home, as I intend sending them to her through Dr. Madden, will understand that I want her to come here. If she does come, any time within a year after I am gone—and she has until midnight of the last day—then the entire estate will be hers, with the exception of this place, which I want Dr. Madden to have, along with the necessary endowment. If she doesn’t come, proof to me that she has no happy recollection of the hours that she spent here, the bulk of the estate will be left as a religious trust fund, the money to be disbursed locally by Chew as he sees fit.”
The diary ended here. It had taken us about two hours to go through it, though it hasn’t taken you ten minutes to read what we picked out—only we didn’t write it down at the time: I borrowed the diary and did that afterwards.
We knew now why the big house had been built here, a secret in itself, and why the body had smelt of drugs. Every part of the dead man’s secret was spread out in our understanding minds. We saw into the lawyer’s scheme, too. He hadn’t written to the granddaughter, at all. And probably he had done everything he could to keep her away from the closed-up house until the year was up. A lot of religious interest he had in the New Zion gang! If they got anything at all out of the fortune, it would be pennies that slipped through his greedy fingers. In the diary, Mr. Danver had said something about his head being on the bum. It sure had been on the bum, all right, to make a will like that!
Oh, if only we could knock the props out from under old fatty! It was an awful thought that he was liable to win out. It fairly made us sick. But what could we do? Certainly, it was too late to go to Pardyville, even if we had known for sure that the granddaughter was hiding there.
Another thing that put weight on our gloom was Dr. Madden’s death. We had figured on him doing something to-night to help the granddaughter. Now he was gone. And unless he had made a further confession at the hospital, before I talked with him, we might never know why he had been hiding in the closed-up house.
That he had “found” the diary, proved, though, even more than the box of drugs in the barn, that he had been hiding here. Reading the book, and thus getting wise to old Chew’s dishonest scheme, he had sent for the granddaughter, who, in turn, had written to the two Doanes, asking them to come on ahead and open up the place for her.