Gabriel laid aside his pipe and held the letter a moment hesitatingly between his finger and thumb. Then opening it, he at once recognised the small Italian hand with which his wife had kept his accounts and written from his dictation, and something like a faint feeling of regret overcame him as he gazed at it, without taking the meaning of the text. And then, with the hesitation, repetition, and audible utterance of an illiterate person, he slowly read the following:--
"I was wrong. You have left something behind you--a secret that as you value your happiness, you must take with you. If you come to Conroy's Hill within the next two hours you shall know it, for I shall not enter that house again, and leave there to-night for ever. I do not ask you to come for the sake of your wife, but for the sake of a woman she once personated. You will come because you love Grace, not because you care for JULIE."
There was but one fact that Gabriel clearly grasped in this letter. That was, that it referred to some news of Grace. That was enough. He put away his pipe, rose, shouldered his pack and pick, and deliberately retraced his steps. When he reached the town, with the shame-facedness of a man who had just taken leave of it for ever, he avoided the main thoroughfare, but did this so clumsily and incautiously, after his simple fashion, that two or three of the tunnel-men noticed him ascending the hill by an inconvenient and seldom used by-path. He did not stay long, however, for in a short time--some said ten, others said fifteen minutes--he was seen again, descending rapidly and recklessly, and crossing the Gulch disappeared in the bushes, at the base of Bald Mountain.
With the going down of the sun that night, the temperature fell also, and the fierce, dry, desert heat that had filled the land for the past few days, fled away before a fierce wind which rose with the coldly rising moon, that, during the rest of the night, rode calmly over the twisting tops of writhing pines on Conroy's Hill, over the rattling windows of the town, and over the beaten dust of mountain roads. But even with the night the wind passed too, and the sun arose the next morning upon a hushed and silent landscape. It touched, according to its habit, first the tall top of the giant pine on Conroy's Hill, and then slid softly down its shaft until it reached the ground. And there it found Victor Ramirez, with a knife thrust through his heart, lying dead!