nstantly on a grand scale.
Occasionally, they visited the father in South America, and once or twice
he visited them, and the bags of gold were always punctually forthcoming.

"Then suddenly, a most appalling thing happened. The district in which
the old don lived was swept by a plague of unusual virulence. De Leon
succumbed before he had time to make any disposition of his property,
even write a line to his daughter. His Yankee overseer in charge of the
mine was also stricken the same day and followed his employer within a
few hours, and the Indian and Spanish laborers on the estate went like
sheep. There is a rumor that misfortunes did not cease here, but that the
plague was followed by an earthquake of a most devastating nature, and
thus the population of that especial district was almost wiped out.

"As soon as the news of these disasters reached the Willoughbys they took
passage at once for South America to verify the terrible rumors. They
found their worst fears confirmed, and to crown their sorrows,
Willoughby, after going over De Leon's papers again and again, could find
no map of the mine, nor any directions as to its location. There were
records enough of the ore mined and shipped, all in the old don's
handwriting, but nothing to aid his son-in-law in rediscovering the mine.

"Willoughby immediately put some experienced prospectors to work and
secured the services of several geological experts, but to no avail. The
mine, mentioned always in the don's documents as The Veiled Mariposa,
seemed to have vanished as completely as if it had never existed, or to
have been sunk by the earthquake into the very bowels of the earth.

"All his efforts to find it having proved useless--efforts extending over
several years--Willoughby put a young nephew of De Leon's, who had
recently arrived from Spain, in temporary charge of the estate and
returned with his wife to France. Accustomed now for many years to a
vast, unconditioned expenditure, he found it impossible to contemplate
the comparative poverty which stared him in the face and he resolved to
try to dispose of the whole estate, which a will of De Leon's made at the
time of her marriage conferred intact upon his daughter Lolita.

"He hoped to sell at a magnificent figure. He trusted to his own magnetic
eloquence and his indisputable proofs of the enormous revenues of the
mine to inflame the cupidity of the purchaser or purchasers to such a
degree that he would find n