The Black Wolf Pack | Page 5

silence. The thoughts and mental pictures of that broken man parting with his baby son seventeen years before made me most unhappy.
Dad broke the silence.
"Well, now you are acquainted with the whole situation, what do you think?"
"I scarcely know what to think," said I. "It does not appear natural for a man to abandon his own son in the manner he did. It seems heartless and cruel. I cannot understand it; yet I wish I could see my poor father. I wonder if he is still alive. Certainly with the information at hand it should not be impossible for me to trace him or some relatives of my mother. Don't you think so?"
"That is what I thought, Don, for when you were three years old I began to wonder about your father's whereabouts. I wanted to meet him and perhaps help him if I could. Do not think that your poor father was cruel, for it is evident that the man was suffering from a nervous breakdown and consequently more or less irresponsible; I think he acted wonderfully well under the circumstances. In order to help him I began a search and for ten years I have had detectives and private individuals following up every possible lead. Yet, with all my efforts, the search has amounted to nothing. Your father's trail ended at a Spokane outfitting store. I could not locate anyone nearer to you than an old maiden great-aunt of your mother's although I have had every clue investigated.
"The only relative of your father's that I could get any information about was his youngest brother, Patrick Mullen, your uncle and a famous gunsmith of Maiden Lane, New York. He is dead now but his reputation for making an exceptionally fine hand-forged gun lives on even to-day. Patrick Mullen died just before I began my search for your father, but in digging around for facts about him, I learned that he had made a limited number of very fine guns, on each of which he had stamped his full name, 'Patrick Mullen.' Other guns of an inferior quality that he made bore the simple stamp of 'P. Mullen.' The old man was very proud of each 'Patrick Mullen' that he turned out and like the true artist that he was he kept track of each one, sold them only to men he knew and when the owner died he bought the gun back himself so that he always knew its whereabouts.
"In that way all of the 101 'Patrick Mullen's' he made came back to him, save one. There is one of the complete number still missing and no one seems to know where it is. This is more remarkable because the missing gun is a flint-lock rifle of the style of seventy years ago. That gun has always struck me as being a valuable clue in our search, because it is the only rifle ever made by the old gunsmith and I have a feeling that that missing 'Patrick Mullen' may have been given to your father by the brother, and that may account for the fact that among the papers of Patrick Mullen there is no record of its whereabouts; this is in a measure confirmed by the report that the man outfitting at Spokane had a long old-fashioned rifle, and collectors say there used to be an expert in antique arms by the name of Mullen."
The suggestion made me tremendously excited. Beyond a doubt in my mind that missing "Patrick Mullen" was my father's gun. I imagined him parting with everything else save the unique gun his famous brother had made for him. Why he should wish for a flint-lock rifle was an unanswerable question, but someone wanted that sort of a gun or it would not have been made, and my father's letters showed him to be a man of sentiment, and impractical, just the sort of fellow to use a flint-lock when he might just as well have had a modern breech-loading high-power rifle.
"I believe you've hit it, dad. Hot dog!" I exclaimed. "Bet a cookie that that gun does belong to my father and if we can find it we will probably find him too--would not that be bully?"
"I feel the same way too, Don. But finding that missing gun will be as difficult as finding your father. I have searched the country over for it and made a wonderful collection of flint-lock guns, as you see by looking at yonder gun-rack; I have had dozens of arms collectors and detectives looking for guns of that description, but no Patrick Mullen rifle has turned up anywhere. There have, of course, been many false clues and many queer rifles offered to me and I have put a great many thousands of dollars into the search, and