"Where was I?" Evors asked. "Oh, yes, I was just leading up to the time when I accompanied your father on his last fatal journey to the mine. At one time I understand it was his intention to take with him the Dutchman, Van Fort, or your mother's brother, Mark Fenwick. However, your father decided against this plan, and I went with him instead. To a great extent it was my doing so that kept Van Fort and Fenwick out of it, for I distrusted both those men, and I believed that they would have been guilty of any crime to learn the secret of the mine. Your father, always trustful and confiding, laughed at my fears, and we started on that fateful journey. I don't want to harrow your feelings unnecessarily, or describe in detail how your father died; but he was foully murdered, and, as sure as I am in the presence of my Maker, the murder was accomplished either by the Dutchman or Fenwick, or between the two of them. Zary mysteriously vanished about the same time, and there was no one to back me up in my story. You may judge of my horror and surprise a little later when Van Fort and Fenwick entered into a deliberate conspiracy to prove that I was responsible for your father's death. They laid their plans with such a diabolical ingenuity that, had I been placed upon my trial at that time, I should have been hanged to a certainty. They even went so far as to tell Beth what had happened, with what result upon her mind you know. At this time Van Fort disappeared, and was never heard of again. Of the strange weird vengeance which followed him I will talk another time. I suppose I lost my nerve utterly, for I became as clay in the hands of Mark Fenwick. Badly as he was treating me, he professed to be my friend, and assured me he had found a way by which I could escape from the death which threatened me. Goodness only knows what he had in his mind; perhaps he wanted to part Beth and myself and get all your father's money into his hands. I suppose he reckoned without your brother, though the latter did not count for much just then, seeing that he was in the hospital at Vera Cranz, hovering between life and death, as the result of his accident. For my own part, I never believed it was an accident at all. I believed that Fenwick engineered the whole business. But that is all by the way. Like the weak fool that I was, I fell in with Fenwick's suggestion and allowed myself to become a veritable tool in his hands, but I did not go till I heard that you had come back again to look after Beth."