ed house and buildings she had left that afternoon
quite failed to fit into any of the pictures. However, she remembered
happily, there was always the prospect of oil.

"It can't be out of the fields," she argued to herself. "Just suppose
oil should be discovered in that section! Bob might easily be a
millionaire!"

Bob was silent, too, but his thoughts were not on a problematical
fortune. He was wondering, with a quickened beating of his heart, how
his mother's sisters would look and whether he should be able to see
in them anything of the girlish face in the long-treasured little
picture that was one of the few valuables in the black tin box.

"There's a team ahead," said Betty suddenly.

Her quick ears had caught the sound of wheels, and though it was
almost dark now, no lantern was lit on the rattling buggy to which
they presently caught up. The rig made such a noise, added to the
breathing of the bony horse that was suffering from a bad case of
that malady popularly known among farmers as "the heaves," that the
occupants were forced to raise their voices to make themselves heard.
The top was up and it was impossible to see who was inside.

"I tell you, let me handle it, and I'll make you thousands," some one
was saying as they passed the buggy single file. "I can manage women
and their money, and I don't believe the idea of oil has as much as
entered their heads."

"Always oil," thought Bob, hurrying his horse to catch up with Betty.
"In Oklahoma the stuff that dreams are made of comes up through an
iron derrick, that's sure."

At the Saunders place, bathed in faint moonlight, they found Doctor
Morrison's car, and a light in the window told that he was waiting
for them.

"Didn't know whether you would make it to-night or not," was his
greeting, as they went around to the kitchen door and he opened it to
show the room brightly lighted by two lamps. "Both patients are
asleep. Miss Charity has laryngitis and Miss Hope a very heavy cold.
But I think the worst is over."

He stopped, and shot a keen glance at Bob.

"Funny," he said abruptly. "For the moment I would have said you
looked enough like Miss Hope to have been her younger brother."

Bob merely smiled at the doctor's remark, for he did not want the
relationship to be guessed before his aunts had recognized him.

CHAPTER XVI

HOUSEKEEPER AND NURSE

"I must be going on," Doctor Morrison continued, finishing his
writing at the kitchen tab