Landing against the bank just above the ferry, she walked over to Cairo and sought for a man who had hired her father to help him hunt for wild turkeys. He was a banker, and would certainly be the right kind of a man to help her, if he would.
“Mr. Brankeau,” she addressed him in his office, “I don’t know if you remember me, but you came hunting to the River Bottoms below St. Genevieve, one time, and you and Father went over into Missouri, hunting turkeys.”
“Remember you?” he exclaimed. “Why—you—of course! Mrs. Carline—Nelia Crele!”
She met his questioning gaze unflinchingly.
“I know I can trust you,” she said, simply. “If you’d known Gus Carline!”
“I knew his father,” Brankeau said. “I reckon as faithless a scoundrel as ever lived. Old man Carline 43 left his first wife and two babies up in Indiana—I know all about that family! I saw by the newspapers––”
“I want some railroad stocks, so I can have interest on my money,” she said by way of nature of her presence there. “When we separated, he let me have this paper, showing he wanted me to share his fortune––”
“He was white as that?” Brankeau exclaimed, astonished at the paper Carline had signed.
“He was that white,” she replied, her eyes narrowing. Brankeau from the wideness of his experience, laughed. She, an instant later, laughed, too.
“So you settled the question between you?” he suggested, “I thought from the newspapers he hadn’t suspicioned—this paper—um-m!”