Another moan was the only answer, but reading in the glazing eyes a wish to speak, Durant knelt down and bent so that his ear touched the stiff lips.
"What is it, Walter?"
"The samples," the young man at last managed to articulate. "The mine——"
"Aye, the mine—the samples!" cried Durant, with frantic eagerness. But Walter's confession never reached the man he had betrayed. A sudden darkness came over Durant. He struggled, but his grasp was pinioned from behind. He tried to cry aloud, but his voice was muffled. Swift, treacherous hands seized him, gagged him, bound him fast, bore him off, blind, mute, a prisoner!
XI
AN INTERNATIONAL EPISODE
With an effort regaining the composure unwontedly ruffled by Scarlett's audacious response to her challenge as to an Irishman's method of love-making, while adjusting hat and hair, whose order, as she blushingly was conscious, had suffered from the same cause, Evelyn hurried toward the fir-encircled spot where she saw Dandy Raish awaiting her.
A fellow-passenger aboard the boat that had brought her party up the Alaskan coast, Travers had lost no chance to ingratiate himself with Evelyn by rendering her all manner of unobtrusive service, so that his letter, requesting this appointment, at an out-of-the-way place under conditions of absolute secrecy, while exciting her curiosity, caused her no alarm. The matter to which he had mysteriously alluded, as of supreme importance to herself and her father, she had assumed to refer to Durant's vast mining interests. She took it for granted that the obliging Mr. Travers was bearer of a remittance that would enable her to defy Scarlett's absurd advice in favor of roughing it, and enable her to resume her wonted style of luxurious living.
To escape awkward questions, she had decided to turn the expedition into a day's outing that should include Sarah and her young companions, thus giving her meeting with Travers the appearance of chance. Scarlett's unforeseen presence on the scene only added a piquancy to the occasion, in her eyes, since she thought it might furnish her with an opportunity to put down that estimable but altogether too masterful young man. That the opportunity would land her in the young man's arms was something she had not reckoned with.