Page:Resurrection Rock (1920).pdf/313

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LUCAS WALKS BY THE LAKE
301

Lucas had Kincheloe silence James Quinlan forever. Old Lucas chose that night to have Quinlan silenced rather than Barney—so Barney was thinking—because Barney would be harmless without Quinlan but Quinlan, besides knowing about Barney, probably knew other inconvenient things also.

Barney returned to the newspapers but only to glance over them in review. The question as to who had sent James Quinlan to Resurrection Rock was beginning to find an answer in Barney's mind. If his mother had been at the bottom of that, might she also have caused those messages to be sent him? Mrs. Wain had said that his mother was on her way to fin him, after having "got track" of him, when she was lost on the Gallantic, which had sunk in English waters. Several different vessels had picked up the survivors from boats and rafts and wreckage and brought the people to England; so Agnes Cullen—concealing her identity for reasons not yet to be known—must have been in England when Barney was there in October. Likely enough, she had been at a London hospital, not far from the house of the medium who amazed Barney by possessing many facts of his boyhood. These were all facts which—as he had said to Ethel, when telling her of it—could have been learned naturally by any one who might have taken the trouble to visit Boyne City and inquire about him; but Barney had not been able to imagine that there could be any one in London who would have gone to that trouble. But he could imagine his mother—Mrs. Oliver Cullen who, after twenty-three years' search, had "got track" of her son—collecting the facts to make certain his identity.

Had she supplied them to the medium? If, so, why had she? If she knew of his presence in London and