Sunset Ranch: A Story of a Boy's Adventures in the West — page 110: what you’re looking at

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

102 Horse Thieves. “Well, to begin with, I’m rich—rich enough to— well, I needn't tell you just how rich. My people sent me to college and I always had the best of everything, though my life has been shadowed with a sorrow which I suppose must have left its impres- sion. “My mother, whom I loved fondly, died a little more than a year ago, leaving all the property to me. “Just before she died she confided to me the fam- ily skeleton, and bound me with a mission to which I solemnly promised to devote much of my time. “It was an old story—there had been a younger sister, whose marriage brought estrangement with the family—a tragedy had followed and then years later it was learned that a motherless child had been left in the father’s care. “Every possible effort was ‘made to discover this lost one, but each trail seemed to end in dismal fail- ure. “Instead of discouraging mother this only served to arouse her ambition, so that the one hope of her life was to find this girl, if living, and share with her the wealth that had come down from my rich, but tyrannical, old Grandfather Lee. “Thus, dying, she bequeathed her mission to me, and I pledged myself to keep up the search wherever I went. “Well, after leaving college, I devoted nearly a year to the task, pursuing all manner of clews, to only meet with continued disappointment. “The last glimmer of hope had brought me out West in search of a man named Jasper Hosmer, to whom it was said the child’s father had left his girl when dying of yellow fever in New Orleans. “As I had always longed to experience the de- lights of cowboy life, I took advantage of the op- portunity you afforded me to kill two birds with ConniclooOokks.€©