"Perhaps," she said, glancing at the telegram to escape his scrutiny, "perhaps he has some idea of bringing up a Mexican establishment?"
"You think he's coming back now?"
"Oh, of course."
"You are doubtless right," he added, smiling too graciously not to raise her doubts, "and we'll soon know."
A week later, the mail brought her the following brief letter, with a Southern postmark.
Dear Sheila:
Fargus has been away a leettle too long. You may be satisfied, I am not. I'm off for Mexico.
Alonzo Bofinger.
"Oh, if he finds him, then everything is lost!" she cried in consternation. "If only I knew how to warn Fargus!"
At the end of three weeks she received a telegram from Bofinger which completed her despair, for he sent but the one word:
"Progress."
Six weeks of torture succeeded, during which she was torn between the fear that the lawyer should learn of the mines and the agony which gradually possessed her as she became convinced that some dreadful accident had happened to Fargus, forever sweeping away her brief vision of fortune. This was the secret of the overwhelming grief which had so mystified Bofinger on the night when he had returned to reveal to the distracted woman the fall of all her hopes and the extraordinary sentence which for seven years she must undergo by the provisions of the common law.