led:

"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