CHAPTER XI.
A TERRIBLE DEED.
Wizard Hermann turned about, half-stunned from his interview with Jessie Stirling, and went back to his laboratory, where he had been reading a new treatise on one of his favorite hobbies—the transmutation of the baser metals into gold. The man had no more heart or conscience than a clam, and his interest in chemistry was greater than his love for humanity.
The greatest aim he had in life was to prosecute to a successful issue the two hobbies that had been the ruling passion of his life, to invent a magic elixir of life, and to create fabulous riches to sustain a life so lengthened in luxury.
He was mad for gold wherewith to purchase the smallest specimen of a newly discovered mineral called radium, to which was ascribed the most remarkable properties ever heard of, but the price of this treasure was fabulous to a man in his situation, impoverished by a lifetime spent in this costly and vain pursuit of the unattainable.
His great plan and hope had been to pay off the mortgage on the place, and to immediately place another upon it, so as to invest a portion in the new mineral, from which so much was hoped and predicted in the scientific world.
His rage at the failure of his plan was deep and bitter. With Leola dead, all his plans would come to naught. Old Bennett would foreclose the mortgage and ruin him. In his old age he must go forth a beggar into the world, friendless, and without a place to lay his head.
Through this terrible trick of fate all his plans and aspirations must be wrecked, and science lose, perhaps, the magnificent discoveries to which he had devoted his life.
No wonder he was filled with a blind fury against Chester Olyphant, through whose treachery Leola’s death had come to pass, thus thwarting all his plans for future gain.
He shut the treatise, whose reading had been so fatefully interrupted, and went out to watch for Chester Olyphant with murder in his heart.