XL.

A MESSAGE FROM THE DEAD. With breathless emotion and almost uncontrollable excitement, Cunningham nervously touched those sacred relics of the past, and read, as it were, a message from the dead. The old walnut center table had been cleared by Mrs. Benton, of its litter of children's clothing, a family album, and the unfinished frame of a mechanical toy which the old grandfather was engaged in making for little Eddie. Piece by piece the old man drew from a large tin cracker box, which had been brought from the attic, what had twenty-two years before been the contents of the valise of the mother of Annie Martin. Four or five pieces of baby's linen, several handkerchiefs, a small bottle of medicine, a half-rotted purse containing a few pieces of Canadian silver and copper money, a leather-covered and agestained catechism, a railroad ticket to St. Louis, and, more important than all, a letter written in feminine handwriting and addressed to James Devereaux. The address on the envelope was obliterated with age and the action of water, but almost overcome with surprise and emotion, Cunningham deciphered what he could of the badly stained pages, parts of which had become faded away.

blame me for coming, for I would....than remain longer here. This letter will reach you before I do and please do not scold me for not obeying your instructions.

Your Own Loisette, Marie has been ill but is better. I have sold everything to Marchaud and expect the Buffalo, N. Y.:- left home an hour after money before Jacques returns. I wrote this letter to you. They drove me out and Marchaud advanced me one hundred dollars to make the trip. I could not wait to see Jacques but wrote him. Marie is well. I will mail this if I am delayed but I hope I will bring it to you.

LOISETTE DEVEREAUX.

Hurriedly Cunningham prepared to leave for Pittsburg on an evening train which stopped at Maple Creek for passengers when flagged. He arranged to have the grave made presentable and made a minute

copy of the letter, which the old man said he would deliver to no one except to the person to whom it was addressed. He said that the Lord had imposed a trust in him and he hoped to live to deliver to the husband of the dead woman, the letter she had written him nearly a quarter of a century before.

At midnight Dave stood in the telegraph office in Pittsburg and sent a message to James Devereaux containing more than a hundred words. In those words he told all

-Devereaux and Annie would know all that he knew. At ten o'clock the following morning Dave received instructions by wire from Devereaux to meet him and Annie at the Southern Hotel in St. Louis on the following day.

XLI.

FATHER AND DAUGHTER.

In a room of the Southern Hotel in St. Louis, James Devereaux, Annie Martin and Dave Cunningham met, and Devereax told for the first time the story of his life-and for the first time the adopted daughter of old John Martin knew her name and her parentage.

James Devereaux twenty-five years before was the son of a farmer of French descent living in an obscure community in the Province of Quebec. Since a boy of ten years of age, young Devereaux had been employed by a wealthy farmer named Jacques Dioniere. The latter had a large family of boys and girls and prided himself on his family connections in France and could trace his family back, generation by generation, through wars of the last century when his great-great-grandfather had set foot in Quebec as an officer of the French army. That officer distinguished himself at Oswego, at Ticonderoga, and at both encounters before Quebec, where in the latter his loved commander, Marquis de Montcalm, lost his life, and his beloved France saw the doom of the grand "Empire of

New France."

Jacques Dioniere had his being in his family history and in all Quebec there were but few families with whom he would desire family connections. His oldest son

had married well and was now the head of a prosperous fishing firm whose boats and nets were well-known off the New Foundland coast. His eldest daughter was completing her education in a convent in France, and no expense was spared to start the younger children in life as they reached the age of maturity.

James Devereaux was the pet of the household. He did the chores, ran the errands, and as he grew up, performed much of the managerial duties of the farm. Old Jacques Dioniere's two youngest children were twins, only two years younger than Devereaux, and between the three there grew a friendship which no family standing could mar. The boy Jacques was the black sheep of the fold. Instead of studiously applying himself for an elevated position in society, he longed for the snow-shoes and the logging camps. The girl was the idol of her father's heart. Little Loisette grew to womanhood as Devereaux grew to

manhood and childish affections were supplemented by passionate love. A secret marriage took place in the city of Quebec, with Jacques, the bosom friend and favorite brother, as the only witness. Days and weeks sped by and Loisette and Devereaux knew that something must be done — either to leave the old home secretly or else brave the reproach of a proud father.

News came of the wonderful gold discoveries in the Western States. Devereaux had not the courage to tell his employer the truth but entrusted to Jacques the burden of the task and bidding Loisette and the family an affectionate good bye he started for the gold country to seek his fortune, so that he could provide for the wife he worshipped.

The unconsolable grief of Loisette upon the departure of Devereaux led to an exposure of the secret marriage. Violent scenes followed, Jacques defending his sister against the entire family. The elder Dioniere philosophically accepted the situation and wrote to Devereaux to return, but the latter had visions of wealth haunting his sleeping hours. Each shining grain as he washed the dirt in a mountain stream, was one more grain for Loisette. promised to return within a few months bearing a treasure that would make the poor son-in-law a respected personage and a welcome member of the proud family of Dioniere.

He

Fortune was fickle; today a nugget, tomorrow disappointment. At times it would seem that the little leathern pouch which contained Loisette's gold was diminishing and then another bright nugget would be added. He sent money to Loisette- more than she had ever owned in her own name, and far more than enough to have supported her had she not been beneath her own father's roof. But it was not gold which Loisette craved, of which she dreamed during her restless nights-it was one kind loving word. Her father had grown distant, the others did not conceal their contempt, and Jacques. dear Jacques, had gone away to the Hudson Bay with a band of trappers.

Little Marie was born and with her arrival came a pronounced change in the treatment of Loisette. Her father intimated that Devereaux had robbed him of the idol of his heart and had now cast it aside as a

child would a toy after having tired of it. The imputation roused a passion nigh akin to jealousy in the mind of Loisette, and passive dislike led to aggressive warfare in the household.

At last a letter came saying that Devereaux would return within two months to bring his wife and child to their new home among the grand white-capped mountains of the West. Only two months to wait and he would return - but ere a single month had passed Loisette lay in a new-made grave near a little country church in the State of Pennsylvania — and from the moment she left her father's house to the time that Cunningham communicated by wire the contents of the age-stained letter, James Devereaux had heard not one word concerning his beloved Loisette.

When word came to Devereaux from Jacques that Loisette had suddenly left her father's house two weeks before his return from trapping, and that she had left a letter for him in which she said that she was going to join Devereaux, the latter was stricken with alarm. Two weeks had passed before Jacques had written! The letter from Jacques had reached Devereaux, and yet no word from Loisette!

Days came and days went by-days became weeks, and yet no news from Loisette. All of the hoardings of Loisette's little pieces of shining gold were expended in messages, traveling, and in services of detectives- but still no trace of Loisette.

Devereaux met Jacques in Montreal. Together they went to the great church in Quebec where they had stood by Loisette's side and the good father had made her his wife. He could not go to St. Pierre- the very thought crazed him, and with broken heart and fevered brain he lay for months in a hospital in that old historic city.

Jacques was a constant attendant, and when Devereaux again grew strong he wandered back to the solitude of those grand snowy mountains of which he had so often written Loisette and which she had so dearly longed to see.

Jacques wrote that he had found a clue to Loisette's death. A mysterious woman with an infant in arms had been seen to throw herself into the St. Lawrence, and her body nor that of the child was never found. It was true the authorities placed no credence in the story but some people liv

ing near the river avowed they had seen this same mysterious woman and baby.

Another year and word came of the death of Jacques in the winter wilds of the great Northwest. On the banks of the McKenzie Jacques had succumbed to pneumonia, and thus the last link of affection between Devereaux and the dream of his youth was broken. Never after that day said he one word to living man of the fruit that had turned to ashes on his lips. He lived a new life he forgot the past.

XLII.

A CURSE.

Two weeks were spent at Maple Creek, and after a visit to New York Judge Newcomb joined the three in Washington. He brought bad news from Mansfield. A terrible plague had swept the town from the highest to the lowest. Smallpox had stricken miners and bankers, the homes of none had escaped its death-dealing breath. While the fatalities had not been above the average for this loathsome disease, it had become violently epidemic and few were the families that did not miss some loved one from their midst. Horror and fear had seized the inhabitants.

The ignorant negro miners ascribed the plague to a curse" of the anarchist, Julius Schwack, whose life was sacrificed in the contest between the Black Diamond Coal Company and the striking miners. An old negro of eighty years who had come with the imported miners from the South, was said by his people to be a voo doo doctor," and that he held communication at his will with the "spirits."

One Sunday night when the negroes were assembled in the little church near Mine No. 5, where Schwack was once accustomed to address the white miners in the days before the strike, a panic took place and a stampede followed in which several children and one woman were injured. The panic was caused by a "spirit," which the superstitious negroes firmly believed had come to give them a warning." It was with much difficulty that by the flickering and smoky lamps the negro preacher could read his text. Suddenly, so said the superstitious colored people, an old white man, stooped shouldered and dwarfish, with great eyebrows bristling from his forehead and dressed in a long black coat and big black

hat, stood beside the preacher and kindly looked down on the audience. He said nothing, but pointed with his long left hand through the window toward the Southeast, and then the lights were suddenly extinguished by a gust of wind from somewhere and the stampede followed.

The old "voo doo doctor" forthwith consulted the spirits. With an old pickle bottle into which was thrust some feathers from a wild turkey's tail, the skeleton of a mouse and the blood of a rabbit, he sat throughout the night and chanted in low tones in his cabin, from which everyone was debarred. The incantation finished, he told his people that the "spirit was that of Julius Schwack who had been murdered and burned in Christ's Mission, that Schwack had been a good man and was now the "guardian spirit of the people who worked in the mines, and that his visitation was for the purpose of warning them of coming evil. The long hand pointing to the Southeast was a message from the "spirits" for them to go back home in the South where they had been born and raised, and unless they went, bad would come of it. The old voo doo doctor was sent back to Alabama, at his own request, by the coal company a few days later. He had created a superstitious craze among the negroes, particularly among the women, and in order to rid the community of his presence the company gladly furnished him passage back to his old home.

A week later, fever appeared in several of the miners' cabins, and the following day the homes of nearly all the wealthy families were visited by negroes begging for money with which to pay their way back to the South. The fever spread with great rapidity and within another twenty-four hours the doctors announced to the public that Mansfield had been stricken with a plague of smallpox.

The public schools were closed, and an exodus by rail of wealthy people from Mansfield set in, only to be arrested by a rigid quarantine from towns both ways on the B. & G. Ry. Families that had every preparation made to go into the mountains, found the scourge among its members.

The negroes died like sheep with the rot, and the disease worked havoc among the remaining families of the white miners.

All of these dreadful things were communicated in detail by the Judge as the four friends sat conversing in the city far distant from the scenes of their past lives. There seemed something repulsive in the name of Mansfield and Marie Devereaux," Annie Martin no longer, asked her father to not go back to the scenes of so much unhappiness. She wanted to spend her days where her mother had lived her short, unhappy life.

Devereaux, too, longed for the scenes of his boyhood days, and the Judge had determined to visit his old home in the beautiful valley of the Shenandoah.

Cunningham thought of two graves way up on the mountain side near where he was born, and his heart almost ceased to beat. He could not renounce his love for those snow-capped peaks, those white feathery clouds and bluest of blue sky, and yet. what of "Annie ?"

Come with us Cunningham," said Devereaux, "and let us spend a few months of pleasure on the St. Lawrence. The trip will do you good-besides, Marie will soon tire of strange scenes and strange people, and she will gladly return with you. You can build a home in Antelope Park and take Marie with you. I am tired and am going to rest myself. I want you to manage my mining interests, and Marie will give you hers. My life has not been misspent entirely, and I hope that the reward of Christian faith is not a myth. If it be real, I shall again see Loisette; if the hope is but the yearning of the human mind and but a fantasy of superstition, then I wish my bones and those of Loisette to lie side by side in the churchyard at St. Pierre. I have always believed in fate. I have always believed that the Creator guides our destinies. I now believe that it was due to His will that dear old John Martin brought my child to me where I could protect her when she needed friends. I have always believed that:

"Though the mills of God grind slowly,
Yet they grind exceeding small;
Though with patience He stands waiting,
With exactness grinds He all.'"'