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 tract?" She fairly catapulted the question at him.

"Oil? . . . No!" Harrington's voice sounded a trifle bewildered.

"Hundreds of millions of barrels!" the girl declaimed. "Underground lakes of it. . . . Rivers of it! . . . Enough to make the tract worth ten times what Boland offered to pay for it! Did you know it?" demanded the girl, searching with terrible earnestness the face of the man she had trusted so entirely with the interests of all her tribesmen.

"Of course, I didn't know it," Henry fended impatiently. "Did anybody?"

"Mr. Boland knew it," the girl affirmed, bosom heaving. "Read this!"

From out of her red silk hand-bag she flung a crumpled document in pen-script upon the lawyer's desk. There were three foolscap pages of it, and Harrington, separating them for scrutiny, saw that the first page was addressed, "Dear Mr. Boland," and the last was signed, "Hiram Stanfield, M. E." Hiram Stanfield was the greatest authority on oil fields and oil indications in America—perhaps in the world.

Harrington started as he read the first lines and his face had whitened before he turned the first page over, for he was reading in it that the great John Boland was but a low, common trickster. The man who had become his idol, the father of the beautiful girl whose heart he had just won, had connived at a colossal fraud, and used him for the instrument of it. As Henry's eyes reached the end, the page shook with his trembling so that he could hardly see the lines. Last of all it occurred to him to look at the date.

"My God!" he groaned. The date of the document