"When did you last see the dece--your cousin, I mean?"

"Never seen her," responded Mr. Hersheimmer.

"What?" demanded Tommy, astonished.

Hersheimmer turned to him.

"No, sir. As I said before, my father and her mother were
brother and sister, just as you might be"--Tommy did not correct
this view of their relationship--"but they didn't always get on
together. And when my aunt made up her mind to marry Amos Finn,
who was a poor school teacher out West, my father was just mad!
Said if he made his pile, as he seemed in a fair way to do, she'd
never see a cent of it. Well, the upshot was that Aunt Jane went
out West and we never heard from her again.

"The old man DID pile it up. He went into oil, and he went into
steel, and he played a bit with railroads, and I can tell you he
made Wall Street sit up!" He paused. "Then he died--last
fall--and I got the dollars. Well, would you believe it, my
conscience got busy! Kept knocking me up and saying: What
abour{sic} your Aunt Jane, way out West? It worried me some. You
see, I figured it out that Amos Finn would never make good. He
wasn't the sort. End of it was, I hired a man to hunt her down.
Result, she was dead, and Amos Finn was dead, but they'd left a
daughter--Jane--who'd been torpedoed in the Lusitania on her way
to Paris. She was saved all right, but they didn't seem able to
hear of her over this side. I guessed they weren't hustling any,