“Your name’s on the envelope. The letter, as you see, has been forwarded from Catskill.”
“Speak to me about this! I haven’t had a letter since you and I left ’Frisco. Who in the wide world is writing to me, and what for?”
McGlory opened the letter and pulled out two folded sheets. His amazement grew as he read. Presently his surprise gave way to a look of delight, and he chuckled jubilantly.
“This is from the colonel,” said he.
“Who’s the colonel?” asked Matt.
“Why, Colonel Mark Antony Billings, of Tucson, Arizona. Everybody in the Southwest knows the colonel. He’s in the mining business, the colonel is, and he tells me that I’m on the ragged edge of dropping into a fortune.”
A man of forty, rather “loudly” dressed, was seated behind the boys, smoking and reading a newspaper. He was not so deeply interested in the paper as he pretended to be, for he got up suddenly, stepped to a marble column near Matt’s chair, and leaned there, still with the cigar between his lips, and the paper in front of his eyes. But he was not smoking, and neither was he reading. He was listening.
“Bully!” exclaimed the overjoyed Matt, all agog with interest. “I’d like to see you come into a whole lot of money, Joe.”
“Well, I haven’t got this yet, pard. There’s a string to it. The colonel’s got one end of the string, ’way off there in Tucson, and the other end is here in New York with a baited hook tied to it. This long-distance fishing is mighty uncertain.”
“What is it? A mining deal?”