"It shall succeed; I say it. We shall go down to Rockhold to-morrow morning and the next day to the works, and there I shall give my whole mind to this matter and make it succeed, do you hear? Make it succeed! And place my name at the head of the list of wealthy men of this age." Mr. Fabian did not dare to raise any objection. "I am pleased, sir," he said, "that you find in this new enterprise an object of so much interest to engage your mind. Employ me in any way you think fit. I am quite at your service, as it is my bounden duty to be." "Very well; that is as it should be. Now I am going to bed. Good night," said the Iron King, abruptly dismissing his son, then rising and ringing for his valet, whose office, since the patient old lady's death, was now no longer a sinecure. It seems passing strange that a man of seventy-six years, who had just lost his life-long and beloved companion--for in his own selfish way he loved her after a sort, and perhaps more than he loved any human being in the world--and who must expect before many years to follow her, should be so full of this world's avarice and ambition; so eager to make more, and more, and more money, and to stand at the head of the list of all the wealthiest men in the land. Strange, yet the name of such a one is legion. But in the case of Old Aaron Rockharrt there might have been this additional motive--the necessity to seek refuge from the pains of grief and remorse in the anxieties and activities of speculation. So he was very eager to get back as soon as possible to business and to enter at once upon the enterprise he had planned. Cora was also anxious to leave the city, which she knew was in a fresh ferment of gossip and conjecture on the subject of her lost husband, the deceased governor-elect. The news from the Indian Territory had renewed all the public interest in the mystery of his disappearance. For some months before this news arrived, the community had settled down to the conviction that the missing governor had been murdered and his body made away with, although, as there was no proof to establish the fact of their theory, there was no thought of inaugurating the lieutenant-governor as chief magistrate of the State. Yet, now, when the startling news came that the missing statesman had been killed by the Comanches in the wilds of the Indian Reservation, far from any agency, and that he had been living and preaching there as a volunteer missionary for many months before the massacre, the mystery of his sudden and unexplained disappearance from the State capital on the day of his inauguration was not cleared up and made intelligible, but darkened and rendered more inscrutable. It was easy enough to understand why a missing man might have been lured away from his dwelling by some false letter or plausible message, and murdered in some secret place where his body lay buried in earth or water, for such crimes were not unfrequent.