"Mrs. von Minden died first. Roger and Dick found her dead up in a
remote canyon. She had thirsted to death. I wrote Elsa of her but not of
her death. That would have set you to worrying about me, Muetterchen. She
had the little black box with her that I wrote Elsa she had demanded
from her husband. Whether she found in it what she wanted no one will
ever know. But her death ended one of those strange, feverish life
dramas that this trackless desert is always turning up. Next they found
Von Minden, alone except for Peter. (You must meet Peter, Papa.) He
probably died of heart failure. We don't know how she got the box away
from him. Maybe she poisoned him. And next Felicia,--Felicia was exactly
as Charley was, Mamma, when she used to come to play with us in the
pool."

Ernest looked at Charley--"I've got to talk about her, Charley, to make
them understand."

Charley moistened her lips, but nodded and Dick put his hand over his
eyes.

"She was like Charley too in that she was the kind of a girl that decent
men instinctively love--not with one of these headlong, unreasoning
loves, you understand. But with the kind of a deep-seated adoration for
beauty and goodness and brain that gets a man where he lives and never
leaves him. That's the way I got to caring for Charley and that's the
way, in embryo, we all loved Felicia.

"In the meantime, you understand we were all working like the very devil
to get the plant up and the alfalfa in. I wrote home of that. How
difficult the work here in the desert was is beyond description. And,
what made it more difficult, after the Smithsonian turned Roger down, he
got to working against time, and though he never said much, he gave an
atmosphere of desperate hurry and worry to the camp, that simply got us
all strung up to the breaking point. At intervals, too, he lost that
famous temper of his. These tempers upset Felicia terribly."

Roger filled his pipe with fingers that trembled a little. But Ernest
was staring out the door now, with eyes that saw nothing.

"Dick varied the monotony two or three times by getting drunk. He is an
ugly whelp when he's drunk. Once he knocked Charley down and Felicia saw
it and Roger and he mixed up over it and Elsa finally straightened it
out, and we let him out of Coventry. But the next time he got drunk,
Felicia, in her fright, ran away into the desert and was killed by a
rattler. Charley and Roger found her. It nearly killed us all. But it
cure