Arizona -- Fiction; Grand Canyon (Ariz.) -- Fiction; Western stories
Ames stumbled on, doggedly. "This last trip out West I just thought
I'd go down to Brown's early stamping grounds and see what kind of a
reputation he had there. I was getting a little fed up on him and I
thought it couldn't hurt me to have a little something on him against a
rainy day, as it were. You see I never did know what this Curly Field
stuff was, but it didn't take me long to run that story down, even if
it was a generation old. Of course, I don't know what Curly told you,
but certainly the official reports of the Field scandal never proved
anything on either Brown or Fowler."
Enoch moved impatiently. But young Ames, standing rigidly before his
desk exclaimed, "Just a moment longer, please, Mr. Secretary! Some of
these facts you know unless Field was so obsessed with the thought of
his brother's alleged wrongs that he did not mention them, but I'll
state them anyhow. The mining and smelting property that caused the
whole row was originally owned by an old timer named Post who struck it
rich late in life, married and died soon after, leaving everything to
his son, a little chap named Arthur. This is the child Field was
supposed to have robbed. Little Arthur died a couple of years after
Field's suicide but by that time there was nothing left of the property
and no one paid any attention to the child's death. But in reading old
Post's will, something piqued my curiosity. In the event of Arthur's
death, the property was to go to old Post's baby nephew, Huntingdon
Post."
Enoch knit his brows quickly but he did not speak and Ames went on,
"Being, of course, in a suspicious state of mind, it struck me as an
unusual coincidence that this child should have died, too. So I made
some inquiries. It was difficult to trace the facts because there were
no relatives. Old Post seemed to have been just a solitary prowler,
coming from nowhere, like so many of the old timers. But finally, I
found an old fellow in the back country who had known old Post. He
told me that little Hunt Post, as he called him, had been killed with
his father and mother in a railway accident. I asked where they got
the child's name and he said the mother's name was Huntingdon. He knew
her when she was a girl living alone with her father in the Kanab
country, north of the Grand Canyon. He said her father died when she
was ten or eleven and a family named Smith sort of brought her up and
she was known as Mary Smith. But when she married, she named the boy
after her father who was a raw boned, red headed man named Enoch
Huntingdon."
Enoch gave Ames a long steady look and the younger man relaxed a little.
"Now," Ames went on, "knowing Brown as I do, I wonder if little Hunt
Post, who, like his mother was red headed and blue eyed, was burned up
in a railroad accident. Did Field speak of the child?"
Enoch pressed the desk button and Abbott came. "Give me the Field
envelope, please, Abbott."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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