These employed many of the most skilled workers in wood and steel.
Money was not a scarcity with the Reades nor was it ever likely to be, with their superlative genius to make it.
Frank opened one letter after another, hastily read them and placed those on a file which he meant to answer.
Some of them were of importance, some were not, but he encountered none which claimed his attention greatly for some while.
Then a letter lay before him, superscribed in a foreign style, and bearing the stamp and postmark of Mexico.
He opened it with a curious premonition of its importance.
The letter was written in Spanish, but Frank knew the language well, so he read it easily.
Thus it read:
“Senor Reade—Pardon me for addressing you, a stranger, but I am impelled to lay before you a matter of the utmost moment. A gentleman from New York has been sojourning in the city of Laredo for the past year, being interested in a certain mining claim in Los Pueblos Mountains, five hundred miles from here, in the interior of Mexico.
“He has busied himself contracting for men and material to dig a shaft and open a rich gold mine upon his claim. He is a gentleman of means, and I am told a former acquaintance of yours. His name is Harvey Montaine.”