"You remember, perhaps," Arthur continued, "how I told you that one reason why I had to go back by way of Santa Fé was because I had some inquiries to make on behalf of my mother. Well, as it turned out, Santa Fé was the wrong place. The place for me to go to was Mosby, and the man for me to ask was—the professor!
"When I reached Mosby yesterday," he continued, "I rode straight on up to his house, when the kindly old gentleman, as soon as I had explained who I was, made me more than welcome. We were sitting last evening talking, when I happened to cast my eye on the professor's book shelf, and there I saw something which brought me out of my chair like a shot. It was a volume of Shakespeare, one of a set, volume two—that book which the professor found in the wagon-bed when he found you. I knew the book in a moment—for we have the rest of the set at home, Dick!"
Dick stopped his horse and sat silent for a moment, staring at Arthur. Then, "Go on," said he once more.
"I pulled the book down from the shelf," Arthur went on, "and looked at the fly-leaf. There was an inscription there—I knew there would be—'Richard Livingstone Stanley, from Anna.'"
"Well," said Dick. His voice was husky and his face was pale enough now.
"Dick," replied Arthur, reaching out and grasping my partner's arm, "my mother's name was Anna Stanley, and she gave that set of Shakespeare to her brother, Richard, on his twenty-first birthday!"
For a time Dick sat there without a word, not at first comprehending, apparently, the significance of these facts—that he and Arthur must be first cousins—while the latter quickly related to us the rest of the story.
Dick's mother having died, his father determined to leave Scotland and seek his fortune in the new territory of Colorado, whose fame was then making some stir in the world. In company, then, with a friend, David Scott—the "Uncle" David whom Dick faintly remembered—he set out, taking the boy with him.
From the little town of Pueblo, on the Arkansas, Richard Stanley had written that he intended going down to Santa Fé, and that was the last ever heard of him. At that time—the year '64—everything westward from the foot of the mountains was practically wilderness. Into this wilderness Richard Stanley had plunged, and there, it was supposed, he and his son and his friend had perished.
As for Dick, he seemed to be dazed—and no wonder. For a boy who had never had any relatives that he knew of to be told suddenly that the young fellow sitting there with his hand on his arm was his own cousin, was naturally a good deal of a shock.