To the Highest Bidder

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1911 edition. Excerpt: ...passed in my checks. Did you picture poor David lying cold and pale under some frozen cairn along the Yukon trail? That's the way they dispose of unlucky prospectors up north; just dig a hole in the snow and drop 'em in; then pile stones on top to keep off the wolves. Ugh I can hear 'em howl, if I stop to to think, now. Did you drop a tear on that imaginary grave of mine up in the Arctic; did you, Barbara? " Her eyes evaded his smiling blue gaze. " Why should you ask? " she hesitated. " It was a great surprise--a great shock." " You refer, of course, to the news of my death," he said. " But you survived the shock, as you call it, and--you are far more beautiful than I remembered you." He leaned forward and rested his head on his clasped hands, his eyes searching her face with smiling boldness. " There are not many men," he went on, " who come back from the grave the way I did to find--everything so unchanged." He sprang from his chair and paced the floor excitedly. " If I'd only come yesterday " he cried. " I had saved enough--I could have prevented that absurd fiasco." He stopped in front of her. " Why didn't you answer my letter, Barbara? " " I couldn't read it," she murmured, a sudden vivid color fluttering in her cheeks. " Jimmy lost it on the way home from the office, and it lay out in the rain a week. I knew, though, that you were not--dead." " And that I had not forgotten you," he urged. " You must have wondered, though, why I had not written before. But I couldn't. I swore when I went away that I would get money--somehow. That I would get enough to save you out of the slavery you were in then. I meant to hire a caretaker for your father, a nurse for the boy. But I had the devil's own luck. Three times I won, only to lose. Then I made a...