Ruel Smith - The Rival Campers Ashore - or, The Mystery of the Mill

Only once did Colonel Witham turn his head and gaze back at the disappearing carriage. Then he glowered angrily.

"I don't want your smiles and fine words," he muttered. "You were too good for me once. Just keep your fine words to yourself. I don't want 'em now."

Colonel Witham, in no agreeable mood, went on and entered at the office door of the mill. A tall, sharp-faced man, seated on a stool at a high desk, looked up at his entrance. One might see at a glance that here was a man who looked upon the world with a calculating eye. No fat and genial miller was James Ellison. No grist that came from his mill was likely to be ground finer than a business scheme put before him. He eyed Colonel Witham sharply.

"Aha, Colonel," he exclaimed, in a slightly sneering tone, "bright and cheery as ever, I see. I thought I'd like to have you drop in and scatter a little sunshine. Sit down. Have a pipe?"

Colonel Witham, accepting the proffered clay and and the essentials for loading it, sat back in a chair, and puffed away solemnly, without deigning to answer the other's bantering.

James Ellison continued figuring at his desk.

"Well," said Colonel Witham after some ten minutes had passed, "Suppose you didn't get me down here just to smoke. What d'ye want?"

"Oh, I'm coming to that right away," replied Ellison, still writing. "You know what I want, I guess." He turned abruptly in his seat, and his keen face shaded with anger. He pointed a long lean finger in the direction of the town of Benton. "You know 'em, Dan Witham," he said, "as well as I do. Though you didn't get skinned as I did. You didn't go down to town, as I did twenty odd years ago, with eight thousand dollars, and come back cleaned out. You didn't invest in mines and things they said were good as gold, and have 'em turn out rubbish. You didn't lose a fortune and have to start all over again. But you know em, eh?"

Colonel Witham nodded assent, and added mentally, "Yes, and I know you, too. Benton don't have the only sharp folks."

"And now," added James Ellison, "when I've got some of it back by hard work, you know how I keep it from them, and from others, too. Well, here's some more of the papers. The mill and a good part of the farm and some more land 'round here go to you this time. All right, eh? You get your pay on commission. Here's the deeds conveying it all to you – for valuable consideration – valuable consideration, see?"

The miller gave a prodigious wink at his visitor, and laughed.

"You don't mind being thought pretty comfortably fixed, eh – all these properties put in your name? Don't do you any harm, and people around here think you're mighty smart. Your deeds from me are all recorded, eh? People look at the record, and what do they see? All this stuff in your name. Well, what do I get out of that? You know. There are some claims they don't bother me with, because they think I'm not so rich as I am. There's property out of their reach, if anything goes wrong with some business I'm in.

"Why? Well, we know why, all right, you and I. Here's the deeds of the same property which you give back to me. Only I don't have them put on record. I keep them hidden – up my sleeve – clear up my sleeve, don't I?"

"You keep 'em hidden all right, I guess," responded Colonel Witham; and made a mental observation that he'd like to know where the miller really did hide them.

"So here they are," continued the miller. "It's a little more of the same game. The property's all yours – and it isn't. You'll oblige, of course, for the same consideration?"

Colonel Witham nodded assent, and the business was closed.

And, some time later, as Colonel Witham plodded up the road again, he uttered audibly the wish he had formed when he had sat in the miller's office.

"I'd like to know where he keeps those deeds hidden," he said, apparently addressing his remark to a clump of weeds that grew by the roadside. The weeds withholding whatever information they may have had on the question, Colonel Witham snipped their heads off with a vicious sweep of his stick, and went on. "I don't know as it would do me any good to know," he continued, "but I'd just like to know, all the same."

And James Ellison, his visitor departed, wandered about for some time through the rooms of his mill. One might have thought, from the sly and confidential way in which he drew an eye-lid down now and again, as he passed here and there, that the wink was directed at the mill itself, and that the crazy old structure was really in its owner's confidence; that perhaps the mill knew where the miller hid his papers.

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