“Did Annie Dale look anything like this?” he asked.
The man gave his companion a look of questioning surprise as he took the picture, and turning it toward the light, examined it critically for a moment.
“It does, and it doesn’t,” he said, at last. “It ain’t so delicate like as she was; the eyes are a little smaller, and the face fuller and rounder. I should say this might be a sister or some relation, but it ain’t the captain’s wife. I say, youngster,” he added, looking Everet full in the eye; “it’s mighty queer that you should have this picture, and it strikes me that I’ve been firing arrows at a mark I’d no notion of hitting. Who be you, anyway?”
“My name is Mapleson,” Everet returned, “and the name of the young lady, whose picture I have shown you, was Miss Nannie Davenport. She married a man by the name of Dale, a distant connection of my father’s family. They had one child, a daughter, whom they named Annie. After her parents’ death, she suddenly left the place where she had lived, and no one ever heard anything of her afterward, and her disappearance was a matter of mystery to all who had ever known her.”
“You don’t say! Well, I am beat!” exclaimed the miner, in astonishment. “Things do come about queer enough sometimes, and I reckon there ain’t much doubt that the woman I’ve been telling you of was the daughter of the one in the picture. But—you say her own name was Annie Dale?” he concluded, looking puzzled.
“Yes.”
“That’s queer, too. Then who was Captain Dale?”
“I do not know; possibly some relative,” Everet said, not caring to destroy the man’s romance by arousing his suspicions that there had been a story of shame enacted in that mountain camp.
Further conversation developed the facts that the stranger was in comfortable circumstances, the owner of two or three mining claims in New Mexico, and was on his way there to try to dispose of them.
Everet Mapleson manifested a great interest in New Mexico, and intimated his desire to accompany his new acquaintance thither.