"That they did not take a child away from the Indian village as the paper in the candlestick declares—"
"And the daughter of Theodomir?"
"Is Keela. They left her by the old chief's wigwam."
Diane stared.
CHAPTER XLIX
MR. DORRIGAN
Carl, traveling north after a day of earnest discussion in his cousin's camp, thought much of the second candlestick. Since that night in Philip's wigwam, it had haunted him persistently. Now with Diane's permission to probe its secret—if, indeed, it had one like its charred companion—he was fretting again, as he had intermittently fretted in the lodge of Mic-co, at the train of circumstances that had interposed delay.
Train and taxi were perniciously slow. Carl found his patience taxed to the utmost.
The grandfather's clock was booming eight when at length, after a gauntlet of garrulous servants, he pushed back the great, iron-bound doors of the old Spanish room in his cousin's house and entered. The war-beaten slab of table-wood, the old lanterns, the Spanish grandee above the mantel, the mended candlestick and its unmarred mate, all brought memories of another night when Starrett's glass had struck the marble fireplace. Vividly, too, he recalled how the firelight had stained the square-paneled ceiling of oak overhead, and how Diane had stood in the doorway. The room was the same. It was a little hard, however, to reconcile the sullen, resentful, impudent young scapegrace of that other night with the man of to-night.