: The Freebooters of the Wilderness by Laut Agnes C - Frontier and pioneer life West (U.S.) Fiction

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I THE MAN WITH THE MOLES 1

II AUNT REBECCA 25

V BLIND CLUES 83

VI THE VOICE IN THE TELEPHONE 100

X THE SMOLDERING EMBERS 171

THE LION'S SHARE

THE MAN WITH THE MOLES

The first time that Colonel Rupert Winter saw Cary Mercer was under circumstances calculated to fix the incident firmly in his memory. In the year 1903, home from the Philippines on furlough, and preparing to return to a task big enough to attract him in spite of its exile and hardships, he had visited the son of a friend at Harvard. They were walking through the corridors of one of the private dormitories where the boy roomed. Rather grimly the soldier's eyes were noting marble wainscoting and tiled floors, and contrasting this academic environment with his own at West Point. A caustic comment rose to his lips, but it was not uttered, for he heard the sharp bark of a pistol, followed by a thud, and a crackle as of breaking glass.

"Do you fellows amuse yourselves shooting up the dormitory?" said he. The boy halted; he had gone white.

"It came from Mercer's room!" he cried, and ran across the corridor to a door with the usual labeling of two visiting cards. The door was not locked. Entering, they passed into a vestibule, thence through another door which stood open. For many a day after the colonel could see just how the slender young figure looked, the shoulders in a huddle on the study table, one arm swinging nerveless; beside him, on the floor, a revolver and a broken glass bottle. The latter must have made the crackling sound. Some dark red liquid, soaking the open sheets of a newspaper, filled the room with the pungent odor of alcohol. Only the top of the lad's head showed--a curly, silky, dark brown head; but even before the colonel lifted it he had seen a few thick drops matting the brown curls. He laid the head back gently and his hand slipped to the boy's wrist.

"No use, Ralph," he said in the subdued tones that the voice takes unconsciously in the presence of death.

"Another victim of the Wall Street pirates," was the colonel's silent judgment on the tragedy. "Lucky for her his mother's dead."

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