Page:Hard-pan; a story of bonanza fortunes (IA hardpanbonanza00bonnrich).pdf/77

Rh properties and realized on them at intervals. People who knew said that since then his circumstances had been desperate, and yet it was known of all men that he was engaged in no paid employment. It was the one point upon which the pride of the erstwhile millionaire was firm. Viola did no work, either. In the West, the woman laboring to help sustain the ruined fortunes of her family is so common a spectacle that the strong man, secure in his riches and his health, felt a species of fierce indignation against the girl for her seeming idleness.

Yet it must take so little to keep them. They owned the house they lived in, and employed no servant, Viola doing all the work of the small menage. He had tried to persuade himself that the colonel was using him for his banker without the girl's knowledge, and then Letitia, with her heavy feminine common sense, had laid her finger on the weak spot in that argument. How could a sudden influx of money enter into so small a household without the cognizance of the person who managed it all? It was nonsensical to think of. She knew—and if she knew, was she not party to the whole sordid, ugly plot?

But here he always stopped. It was impossible. It could not be. The image of her face rose before him, as it often did now, making