lbur cried out, in a choked way; then, his voice steadying, he rushed
on: "Listen! I am a ruined man, absolutely ruined. And Markel has ruined
me--I did not see through his trick until too late. Listen! For years,
as a mining engineer, I made a good salary--and I saved it. Two years
ago I had nearly seventy thousand dollars--it represented my life work.
I bought an abandoned mine in Alaska for next to nothing--I was certain
it was rich. A man by the name of Thurl, Jason T. Thurl, another mining
engineer, a steamer acquaintance, was out there at the time--he was a
partner of Markel's, though I didn't know it then. I started to work the
mine. It didn't pan out. I dropped nearly every cent. Then I struck
a small vein that temporarily recouped me, and supplied the necessary
funds with which to go ahead for a while. Thurl, who had tried to buy
the mine out from under my option in the first place, repeatedly then
tried to buy it from me at a ridiculous figure. I refused. He persisted.
I refused--I was confident, I KNEW I had one of the richest properties
in Alaska."

Wilbur paused. A little row of glistening drops had gathered on his
forehead. Jimmie Dale, balancing Markel's cash box on one knee, drummed
softly with his finger tips on the cover.

"The vein petered out," Wilbur went on. "But I was still confident.
I sank all the proceeds of the first strike--and sank them fast, for
unaccountable accidents that crippled me both financially and in the
progress of the work began to happen." Wilbur flung out his hands
impotently. "Oh, it's a long story--too long to tell. Thurl was at the
bottom of those accidents. He knew as well as I did that the mine was
rich--better than I did, for that matter, for we discovered before we
ran him out of Alaska that he had made secret borings on the property.
But what I did not know until a few hours ago was that he had actually
uncovered what we uncovered only yesterday--the mother lode. He was
driving me as fast as he could into the last ditch--for Markel. I
didn't know until yesterday that Markel had any thing to do with it. I
struggled on out there, hoping every day to open a new vein. I raised
money on everything I had, except my insurance and the mine--and sank
it in the mine. No one out there would advance me anything on a property
that looked like a failure, that had once already been abandoned. I
have always kept an office here, and I came back East with the idea of
raising something o