“And arrange with the judge,” he said, his own voice uncertain.  “Yes, Gloria.”

She ran by him then.  He heard her going upstairs, he heard a door closing after her.  Then like a man who treads on air he went to the window and threw it up and called: 

“Jim!  Tell the judge not to go.  I have business with him.  I want him and you here in ten minutes.”

And then when Jim’s voice had answered him he thought to take up the parcel on the table—­largely because Gloria had asked him!  A hurried letter from Ben and the parcel from Honeycutt’s.  Something here for which he had been seeking, working, for years, remembered now only because Gloria had made the request that they be not forgotten.

* * * * *

To withdraw his racing thoughts from Gloria and her golden promise, to bend them to a letter—­this was in the beginning an effort.  But Ben’s words caught him when he had read the first line.  He had opened the packet, ripping off the old encasement of cloth.  There was a book, a Bible that looked to be centuries old, battered, the covers gone; Gaynor’s letter was slipped into it: 

    “DEAR MARK: 

“Honeycutt’s dead.  I’ve got his secret.  But Brodie came near doing me in.  Honeycutt, dying, sent for me.  I got there just in time.  He gave me the Bible; it was the “parson’s” and then Gus Ingle’s.  As I was going out of the cabin Brodie and two of his gang swooped down on me.  In the dark I pitched the Bible clear and they did not see; it was just that near!  They came close to killing me; when I came to I found they’d been through my pockets.  I don’t know how much Brodie knows.  I do know he is working with Gratton, the dirty crook.  I think you can beat them to it, hands down.  And, for God’s sake, Mark, and for my sake if not for your own, don’t let the grass grow!  I am on the edge of absolute bankruptcy; laid up this way I don’t see a chance unless you find what we’ve been after so long and find it quick.  Will you start without any delay?  As soon as you get this phone to Charlie Marsh at Coloma.  Leave word for me.  And let that word be that nothing on earth will stop you!  Then I won’t go crazy here with worry.  And watch out for Gratton as well as Brodie.

    “BEN.”

A bit of the old interest swept back over King as he read; the old excitement raced through his blood.  He dropped Ben’s note into the stove and eagerly took up the old Bible.  There on the blank pages, written in a crabbed hand long ago, at times letters blurred out but always a trace left where the unaccustomed scribe had borne down hard in his painful labourings, was the “secret” at last—­Gus Ingle’s message come to him across the dead years: