Читать книгу Hard-Pan. A Story of Bonanza Fortunes онлайн

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Her husband looked at her with indulgent and humorous appreciation of her quickness.

“I don’t see, if Colonel Reed has a daughter,” he said, “what he keeps her on. She can’t live on the memory of his bonanza glories. The old fellow hasn’t got a cent in the world. White Pine scooped the last dollar he had. When did his wife die?”

Letitia, who was twelve years her sister’s junior, and, even if she had not been, would not have felt sensitive about her accumulating birthdays, answered:

“Oh, long ago. Colonel Reed’s always been a widower ever since I can remember.”

“I remember hearing about his wife when I was a boy,” said Mortimer. “She was a young actress, and married the colonel when everything was going his way. Then she died in a year or two of consumption. I didn’t know there was a child.”

“She must be quite young, then,” said Maud Gault. “What did you hear about her, Letitia?”

“Nothing much; only that she was pretty, and lived in an old ramshackle house somewhere across town, and that nobody knows anything about her. One of the girls was talking about it the other day at Mamie Murray’s lunch, and I thought it was so funny, everybody knowing about Colonel Reed, that he should have had a daughter that none of us had ever heard of. That’s why I asked John. He knows more of those queer, left-over people than anybody else.”