"You don't!" said Donna Maria, rising to her feet, with white in her cheek, fire in her eyes, and a stridulous pitch in her voice. "You don't! Well, I will tell you! It was the same news that this brought." She took a telegraphic dispatch from her pocket and shook it in the face of Father Felipe. "There! read it! That was the news sent to him! That was the reason why he turned and ran away like a coward, as he is! That was the reason why he never came near me, like a perjured traitor as he is! That is the reason why he came to you with his fastidious airs and his supercilious smile, and his—his— O how I hate him! That is why!—read it! read it! Why don't you read it?" (She had been gesticulating with it, waving it in the air wildly, and evading every attempt of Father Felipe to take it from her.) "Read it! Read it and see why! Read and see that I am ruined!—a beggar! a cajoled and tricked and deceived woman—between these two villains, Dumphy and Mis—ter—Arthur—Poin—sett! Ah! Read it; or are you a traitor too? You and Dolores and all—"
She crumpled the paper in her hands, threw it on the floor, whitened suddenly around the lips, and then followed the paper as suddenly, at full length, in a nervous spasm at Father Felipe's feet. Father Felipe gazed, first at the paper, and then at the rigid form of his friend. He was a man, an old one, with some experience of the sex, and, I regret to say, he picked up the paper first, and straightened it out. It was a telegraphic dispatch in the following words:
"Sorry to say telegram just received that earthquake has dropped out lead of Conroy Mine! Everything gone up! Can't make further advances, or sell stock.—Dumphy."
Father Felipe bent over Donna Maria and raised her in his arms. "Poor little one!" he said. "But I don't think Arthur knew it!"
CHAPTER XLVI.
COL. STARBOTTLE ACCEPTS AN APOLOGY.
For once, by a cruel irony, the adverse reports regarding the stability of the Conroy Mine were true! A few stockholders still clung to the belief that it was a fabrication to depress the stock; but the fact, as stated in Mr. Dumphy's dispatch to Donna Maria, was in possession of the public. The stock fell to $35, to $30, to $10—to nothing! An hour after the earthquake it was known in One Horse Gulch that the "lead" had "dropped" suddenly, and that a veil of granite of incalculable thickness had been upheaved between the seekers and the treasure, now lost in the mysterious depths below. The vein was gone! Where, no one could tell. There were various theories, more or less learned. There was one party who believed in the "subsidence" of the vein ; another who believed in the "interposition" of the granite, but all tending to the same conclusion—the inaccessibility of the treasure. Science pointed with stony finger to the evidence of previous phenomena of the same character visible throughout the Gulch. But the grim "I told you so" of nature was, I fear, no more satisfactory to the dwellers of One Horse Gulch than the ordinary prophetic distrust of common humanity.
The news spread quickly, and far. It overtook several wandering Californians in Europe, and sent them to their bankers with anxious faces; it paled the cheeks of one or two guardians of orphan children, frightened several widows, drove a confidential clerk into shameful exile, and struck Mr. Raynor in Boston with such consternation, that people for the first time suspected that he had backed his opinion of the resources of California with capital. Throughout the length and breadth of the Pacific slope it produced a movement of aggression which the earthquake had hitherto failed to cover. The probabilities of danger to life and limb by a recurrence of the shock had been dismissed from the public consideration, but this actual loss of characteristic property awakened the gravest anxiety. If nature claimed the privilege of, at any time, withdrawing from that implied contract under which so many of California's best citizens had occupied and improved the country, it was high time that something should be done. Thus spake an intelligent and unfettered press. A few old residents talked of returning to the East.
During this excitement Mr. Dumphy bore himself toward the world generally with perfect self-confidence, and, if anything, an increased aggressiveness. His customers dared not talk of their losses before him, or exhibit a stoicism unequal to his own. "It's a blank bad business," he would say; "what do you propose?" And as the one latent proposition in each human breast was the return of the money invested,
