“I notice that Teddy says in his letter you refused to take the property he left as payment for your debt,” said Mrs. Rushton. “I think that was fine of you, Aaron.”
“I don’t prey on widows and orphans,” replied Aaron, dismissing the matter with a curt wave of the hand. “Least of all, on the widow and orphan of James Montgomery.”
106“But didn’t you hear of this chest of gold at the time Mrs. Montgomery wrote to you?” asked Mrs. Rushton.
“Only in a vague and jumbled way,” answered Aaron. “She was so much upset and distressed that I couldn’t make much of her letter. I gathered that he had taken a box containing a large amount of money aboard a coastwise craft, and that he had been found later drifting in an open boat. He had been wounded, and the presumption was, of course, that he had been assaulted and robbed of the money. But, of course, I concluded, as I suppose every one else did, that the money had been divided and spent. At any rate, I gave it up for gone from that moment.”
“Did you follow the matter up in any way?” asked his brother.
“Not to any great extent,” was the answer. “I sent a specialist up to Canada to see if he could do anything toward getting back poor Montgomery’s reason, and I offered a reward for the discovery and arrest of the thieves. But nothing came of it, and after Montgomery died a year or so later, I gave the matter up. I haven’t thought of it for a long time, until this letter came to-day.”
“Well, it looks as though there is a chance at least of getting the gold,” commented Mansfield Rushton.
“After all these years!” added Mrs. Rushton, 107 whose imagination had been captured by the romance and tragedy of the story.
“Of course, it’s only a chance,” said Aaron, on whom doubts began to crowd after the first exhilaration. “They’re a long way off from finding it yet. They have only the most slender kind of clues.”
“I believe they’ll do it,” said Mansfield, buoyantly. “Those boys seem to have a knack of getting what they go after.”