Karl had been instructed to watch the attempts to get the package of bills from the water, and to let Stanley know by telephone if there should be any result. The stolid chauffeur could be depended on. His faithfulness had been proved in years of service, and his honesty was beyond question.
Under the influence of a good dinner and cheerful conversation, Stanley was able to look upon his heavy loss with a more hopeful eye afterward.
Lawrence K. Ranfelt was a man of fifty or thereabouts, with a jolly manner, a clean-cut, shaven face, and grip when he shook hands that conveyed sincerity that won Stanley’s confidence at once.
What particularly pleased Stanley Downs was that his host did not say much about the part Stanley had taken in saving his daughter from death. All he did was to shake the young man’s hand and whisper, after a ten minutes’ talk alone with his daughter:
“Helen has told me, Mr. Downs. I thank you from the bottom of my heart. That sounds stupidly inadequate, but I mean it. She says that if you had not dragged her from the car down there at the bottom of the lake, she must have been drowned. You had opened the door before the accident, so that she could get out. That was something everybody might not have thought of. But even then she would have died if it had not been for what you did afterward.”
This was just before dinner, after Stanley had put on evening clothes from Clay Varron’s rather extensive wardrobe, and when the men were in the library, waiting for the call.
“By the way, Mr. Downs, you have not met Mr. Burnham—Victor Burnham,” added Ranfelt, as a tall, lean man, who might have been any age between thirty and fifty, but who really was thirty-five, slipped into the library. “Burnham has been associated with me in the West for years. He was my superintendent when I made my first good strike, and he is still looking out for the Ranfelt interests in the West. But he is not a mere superintendent now. His holdings in Nevada mines have made him a millionaire several times over. At least, that’s what people say. Eh, Burnham?”
Victor Burnham shrugged his shoulders deprecatingly, as he shook hands with Stanley in a rather grudging fashion.
“People say many things that would be better unsaid!” he growled. “My private affairs are my own.”
Lawrence K. Ranfelt turned away, with a careless laugh. He knew the saturnine disposition of his old-time assistant, and never took notice of his surly manner. But Stanley Downs decided, in his own mind, that he didn’t like Victor Burnham.