Ruth gathered up her things to leave.
“Please don’t go.—Now that just slipped out. I swear I’ll not say another word on the subject as long as I live, if you’ll just sit down.”
“I can’t trust you.”
“Yes, you can, I swear it; and I’ll tell you all about Miss Dockett and—Steve Allen.”
This was too much for Ruth, and she reseated herself with impressive condescension.
Miss Welch was greatly interested for other reasons. Her father’s health had not been very good of late, and he had been thinking of getting a winter home in the South, where he could be most of the time out of doors, as an old wound in his chest still troubled him sometimes, and the doctors said he must not for the present spend another winter in the North. He had been in correspondence with this very Mr. Still, who was spoken of so highly in those letters, about a place just where this trouble was.
Besides, a short time before this conversation of Ruth’s with Thurston, Major Welch had received a letter from Middleton, who was still abroad, asking him to look into his affairs. He had always enjoyed a large income, but of late it had, he stated, fallen off, owing, as Mr. Bolter, his agent, explained, to temporary complications growing out of extensive investments Bolter had made for him on joint account with himself in Southern enterprises. These investments, Mr. Bolter assured him, were perfectly safe and would yield in a short time immense profits, being guaranteed by the State, and managed by the strongest and most successful men down there, who were themselves deeply interested in the schemes. It had happened, that the very names Bolter had given as a guarantee of the security of his investment, had aroused Middleton’s anxiety, and though he had no reason, he said, to doubt Bolter, he did doubt Leech and Still, the men Bolter had mentioned.
Major Welch had made an investigation. And it had shown him that the investments referred to were so extensive as to involve a considerable part of his cousin’s estate.
Bolter gave Major Welch what struck the latter quite as an “audience,” though, when he learned the Major’s business, he suddenly unbent and became much more confidential, explaining everything with promptness and clearness. Bolter was a strong-looking, stout man, with a round head and a strong face. His brow was rather low, but his eyes were keen and his mouth firm. As he sat in his inner business office, with his clerks in outer pens, he looked the picture of a successful, self-contained man.
“Why, they fight a railroad coming into their country as if it were a public enemy,” he said to Major Welch.