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"It's my business to get back what I've lost and a little bit more. You leave it to me. Keep away from Culver, and bring me thirty thousand in the morning." Bostwick was breathing hard. He maintained a show of calm. "The morning's a little bit soon for me to turn around. I'll bring it when I can." McCoppet arose. The interview was ended. He added: "Have a drink?"
Joanne carried the pail. Her eyes were big and bright and searching in that thick-growing dusk of night. She walked very close to Aldous, and she said: "John, I know how careful you and Donald have been in this journey into the North. I know what you have feared. Culver Rann and Quade are after the gold, and they are near.
It was not alone the boys and young men who had gone, wrote Mrs. Mason, but the middle-aged men, too. Dr. Russell had kept the Pendleton Academy open, but he had no pupil over sixteen years of age. There were no trustees, because they had all gone to the war. Senator Culver had been killed in the fighting in Tennessee, but she heard that Colonel Kenton was alive and well and with Bragg's army.
But all the more did the silent sympathy of his friends go out to him. To Harriet Culver he said the one thing that these friends, comparing notes, considered indicative of his real feeling. Harriet, who met him on the Common one cold afternoon, reproached him, during the course of a slow ride, for his non-appearance at various dinners and teas.
"It was a wunerful, wunerful fight, Johnny!" said old Donald. "It was, Mac. And you came in fine on the home stretch!" "What d'ye mean home stretch?" queried Donald leaning over. "You saved me from Quade." Donald fairly groaned. "I didn't, Johnny I didn't! DeBar killed 'im. It was all over when I come. On'y Johnny I had a most cur'ous word with Culver Rann afore he died!"
Next he called up in succession five of the great individual money-lenders of Wall Street, pledged them to secrecy and made arrangements for them to call upon him at his house at different hours that day and Sunday. Another might have intrusted the making of these arrangements to Culver or Langdon, but Dumont never let any one man know enough of his plan of battle to get an idea of the whole.
But as Culver's victory was merely for a very light and empty-headed lady of the stage while he had won Josephine Burroughs away from Culver, the balance was certainly not against him.
"If you had seen her when she said it, and if you'd known her as long as I have, you wouldn't say that," replied Culver. "We must try to get the money here, right away at the banks." "All shut," said Merriweather "I wonder how much cash there is at the Woolens and the Oil and Steel offices? We must get together as much as we can quietly."
He had not seen her. And surely Quade had not had time to formulate a plot with his partner before MacDonald wrote his warning. Besides, an attempt had been made to assassinate the old mountaineer! MacDonald had not warned him against Quade. He had told him to guard himself against Rann. And what reason could this Culver Rann have for doing him injury?
The more he thought of it the more puzzled he became. And then, in a flash, the possible solution of it all came to him. Had Culver Rann discovered the secret mission on which he and the old mountaineer were going into the North? Had he learned of the gold where it was to be found? And was their assassination the first step in a plot to secure possession of the treasure?
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