Page:Frank Stockton--Adventures of Captain Horn.djvu/215

ADVENTURES OF CAPTAIN HORN City of Mexico—how long he could not tell, for much of the treasure might have to be shipped to the United States, and his plans for all this business were not yet arranged.

Before this letter had been received, Mrs. Cliff had believed it to be undesirable to remain longer in San Francisco, and had gone to her home in a little town in Maine. With Edna and Ralph, she had waited and waited and waited, but at last had decided that Captain Horn was dead. In her mind, she had allowed him all the time that she thought was necessary to go to the caves, get gold, and come to San Francisco, and as that time had long elapsed, she had finally given him up as lost. She knew the captain was a brave man and an able sailor, but the adventure he had undertaken was strange and full of unknown perils, and if it should so happen that she should hear that he had gone to the bottom in a small boat overloaded with gold, she would not have been at all surprised.

Of course, she said nothing of these suspicions to Edna or Ralph, nor did she intend ever to mention them to any one. If Edna, who in so strange a way had been made a wife, should, in some manner perhaps equally extraordinary, be made a widow, she would come back to her, she would do everything she could to comfort her; but now she did not seem to be needed in San Francisco, and her New England home called to her through the many voices of her friends. As to the business which had taken Mrs. Cliff to South America, that must now be postponed, but it could not but be a satisfaction to her that she was going back with perhaps as much money as she 201