er tone dropped
persuasively. "There's something that's not quite clear in my mind
yet. I've been bursting to ask you, but you were too sick. Where does
young Mr. Thode come in on this and how did you find out that old Rosa
Mendez was the one who signed Tia Juana's name to that false deed?"

"I didn't. It was Mr. Thode who found that out for me," Willa
explained. "You see, when I met him out in Topaz Gulch I told him I
was coming down here and he said he'd be here, too; his presence would
have been necessary, anyway, to prove that I was really Willa Murdaugh.
Dan's sister was taking care of Tia Juana and Jose for me in
Philadelphia, where those who were fighting me wouldn't think of
searching.

"When I settled up my affairs out West, I wired Dan, and he brought Tia
Juana and Jose down to Victoria to meet me. There I found Mr. Thode
again. He had suspected trickery and fraud in connection with the
making over of the lease, and when the Notary Public described the
woman who had appeared before him as Tia Juana with--with Starr
Wiley----" Her voice sank at mention of the name which had cast such a
shadow over her for many days. "Mr. Thode knew it was an impostor. He
realized that Wiley would not have selected a woman from either
Victoria or Limasito to play the part for she might have been
recognized, so he scouted around in the neighborhood of the Lost Souls'
Pool itself, and found that a poor, old, half-witted creature, who had
lived all her days in a wretched hovel near the Trevino hacienda, had
suddenly come into money from a mysterious source, and moved away.
That was Rosa Mendez.

"When he talked to her closest associates in the poor quarter where she
lived, Mr. Thode found that Rosa had had a fair education, but all the
money she could earn or scrape together went for hootch."

"I remember her from the time we lived out that way," Sallie remarked.
"I hired her to help in the cook-house when we had extra hands on for
the pickin', and she stole all the pots she could carry off."

"Mr. Thode found out, too, that for the last few days before she went
away she shut herself up in her hut and wouldn't let anybody in, but
one of the neighbor women peeped in through a window, and saw her
writing something over and over on scraps of paper and burning them
carefully in the stove." Willa went on. "That must have been Tia
Juana's signature. Then when he heard that she was seen talking to a
man who answered to