Page:Wilson - The Boss of Little Arcady (1905).djvu/346



significance of Miss Lansdale's manner, rather than her words, ran through my darkened thoughts like a thread as I played the game that night. After a third defeat this thread seemed to guide me to daylight from a tortuously winding cavern. At first the thing was of an amazing simplicity.

In a far room was a chest filled with forgotten odds and ends that had come back with me years before. I ran to it, and from under bundles of letters, old family trinkets, a canteen, a pair of rusty pistols, and other such matters, I brought forth an ambrotype—the kind that was mounted in a black case of pressed rubber and closed with a spring.

But even as I held the thing, flushed with my discovery, another recollection cooled me, and the structure of my discovery tumbled as quickly as it had built itself. Little Miss had found her own picture when she found him. Her mother had told me this definitely. It had been clutched in his hands, and she, after a look, had tenderly replaced it to stay with his dust forever. This I had forgotten at first, in my eagerness for light.

I pressed the spring that brought the face to my