s body trembled. The girl went up to him with a glad smile. The
priest looked up, and muttered something incoherent under his breath a
she took her hand.

"Where are we going, Padre?" she asked.

He drew some loose change from his pocket, and hailed an approaching
street car.

"To police headquarters," he replied, "to ask them to help us find
your friends."

CHAPTER 4

From the mysterious wastes which lie far out on the ocean, the fog was
again creeping stealthily across the bay and into the throbbing
arteries of the great city. Through half-opened doors and windows it
rolled like smoke, and piled like drifted snow against the mountains
of brick and stone. Caught for a moment on a transient breeze, it
swirled around a towering pile on lower Broadway, and eddied up to the
windows of the Ketchim Realty Company, where it sifted through the
chinks in the loose frames and settled like a pall over the dingy
rooms within.

To Philip O. Ketchim, junior member of the firm, it seemed a fitting
external expression of the heavy gloom within his soul. Crumpled into
the chair at the broad table in his private office, with his long,
thin legs stretched out before him, his hands crammed into the pockets
of his trousers, and his bullet-shaped head sunk on his flat chest,
until it seemed as if the hooked nose which graced his hawk-like
visage must be penetrating his breast-bone, the man was the embodiment
of utter dejection. On the littered table, where he had just tossed
it, lay the report of Reed and Harris on the pseudo-mineral properties
of the Molino Company--the "near-mines" in the rocky canon of the
far-off Boque. Near it lay the current number of a Presbyterian
review, wherein the merits of this now moribund project were
advertised in terms whose glitter had attracted swarms of eager,
trusting investors.

The firm name of Ketchim Realty Company was something of a misnomer.
The company itself was an experiment, whose end had not justified its
inception. It had been launched a few years previously by Douglass
Ketchim to provide business careers for his two sons, James and
Philip. The old gentleman, still hale and vigorous, was one of those
sturdy Englishmen who had caught the infection of '49 and abruptly
severed the ties which bound them to their Kentish homes for the
allurements of the newly discovered El Dorado of western America.
Across the death-haunted Isthmus of Panama and up the inhospitable
Pacific coast