it."

Mrs. Medliker gasped again and stared hopelessly at the ceiling. Yet she
was conscious of a certain relief. After all, it was POSSIBLE that he
had found it--liar as he undoubtedly was.

"Then why don't you say where, you awful child?"

"Don't want to!"

Johnny would have liked to add that he saw no reason why he should tell.
Other people who found gold were not obliged to tell. There was Jim
Brody, who had struck a lead and kept the locality secret. Nobody forced
him to tell. Nobody called him a thief; nobody had dragged him about by
the arm until he showed it. Why was it wrong that a little boy should
find gold? It wasn't agin the Commandments. Mr. Staples had never got up
and said, "Thou shalt not find gold!" His mother had never made him pray
not to find it! The schoolmaster had never read him awful stories of
boys who found gold and never said anything about it, and so came to a
horrid end. All this crowded his small boy's mind, and, crowding, choked
his small boy's utterance.

"You jest wait till your father comes home," said Mrs. Medliker, "and
he'll see whether you 'want to' or not. And now get yourself off to bed
and stay there."

Johnny knew that his father--whose teams had increased to five wagons,
and whose route extended forty miles further--was not due for a week,
and that the catastrophe was yet remote. His present punishment he had
expected. He went into the adjoining bedroom, which he occupied with
his sister, and began to undress. He lingered for some time over one
stocking, and finally cautiously removed from it a small piece of flake
gold which he had kept concealed all day under his big toe, to the
great discomfort of that member. But this was only a small, ordinary
self-martyrdom of boyhood. He scratched a boyish hieroglyphic on the
metal, and when his mother's back was turned scraped a small hole in the
adobe wall, inserted the gold in it, and covered it up with a plaster
made of the moistened debris. It was safe--so was his secret--for it
need not, perhaps, be stated here that Johnny HAD told the truth and HAD
honestly found the gold! But where?--yes, that was his own secret! And
now, Johnny, with the instinct of all young animals, dismissed the whole
subject from his mind, and, reclining comfortably upon his arm, fell
into an interesting study of the habits of the red ant as exemplified in
a crack of the adobe wall, and with the aid of a burnt match succeeded
in diverting for the res