Page:Hard-pan; a story of bonanza fortunes (IA hardpanbonanza00bonnrich).pdf/186

174 not for a moment think that this disappearance of the Reeds was other than temporary.

At the corner he stopped and inquired for them at Coggles the grocer's. Coggles himself answered his inquiries. He had even less information to give than Mrs. Robson. A week before the colonel had paid such small amounts as he yet owed, and had casually mentioned the fact that he had sold his house and was about to leave the city. This was all Coggles knew. He showed some desire to talk over the colonel's pecuniary difficulties, but Gault cut him short and left the store.

Gault walked away, feeling dazed and hardly master of himself. It had been so absolutely unexpected that he did not yet send his mind back over their past intercourse to ask what she might have been thinking since he saw her last. As is the case of the man in love, he had seen the situation only from his own side. But he did not for a moment doubt that he would hear from her within the next few days.

He was still with his brother a good deal of the time, and the days that followed passed with the swiftness which characterizes hours filled with various anxieties. Four days after learning of her flight, two weeks from the evening that he had seen her last, the janitor at his office handed him a small but heavy package. It had been left early in the morning by a boy,