The $500 Check — page 275: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

CHAPTER XXX. BERT OBTAINS AN IMPORTANT CLEW. R. HARDING was not a literary man, and his papers would hardly have been of any value to a publisher. They consisted principally of letters, somc of them ten years old. It seemed to have been a habit vi Ralph Harding to Keep his letters, though he proba- bly set no great value upon them. Bert opened fifteen or twenty, and glanced over them, only to find that they related to matters in which he felt no interest whatever. He began to doubt whether they were even worth the small sum he had paid for them, when all at once he made a discovery. He found a letter dated Lakeville. ‘Who can have written him from Lake- ville?’’ he asked himself, and naturally turned the page to read the signature. His heart beat quickly when he read the name of the writer—Albert Marlowe. It was 26 EGEomicbooks