During these eight or nine years he has
lived by himself in the same old family house where he had lived with
his parents, in a lonely spot near Pelham. And he has lived in a most
frugal, even miserly, manner. His income could not have been less than
six thousand dollars a year, and his expenditures could not have been
more than six hundred. His dementia, ironically enough from the day that
he came into his fortune, took the form of a most pitiable and abject
fear that he would die in poverty, misery, and want; and so, year after
year, cashing his checks as fast as he got them, never trusting the bank
with a penny, he kept hiding away somewhere in his house every cent he
could scrape and save from his income--which to-day must amount, at a
minimum calculation, to fifty thousand dollars."
"And," observed Jimmie Dale quietly. "Connie Myers robbed him of it,
and--"
"No!" Her voice was quivering with passion, as she caught up his words.
"Twice in the last month Connie Myers TRIED to rob him, but the money
was too securely hidden. Twice he broke into Doyle's house when the old
man was out, but on both occasions was unsuccessful in his search, and
was interrupted and forced to make his escape on account of Doyle's
return. To-night, an hour ago, in an empty room on the second floor
of that tenement, in the room facing the landing, old Luther Doyle was
MURDERED!"
There was silence for an instant.
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