business, and for a time all seemed to go
well. As my partner chose to keep the books, I was not so clear as I
wished to be about matters, but we seemed to be prospering. One morning,
however, on coming to business, I found that my partner had disappeared,
after possessing himself of all the money he could collect on the credit
of the firm. Of course we were bankrupts, or rather I was, for he left
me to bear the brunt of failure."

"Have you ever seen him since, Mr. Ferguson?"

"From that day to this--twenty years--I have never set eyes on Sandy
McIntire."

"It was a mean trick to serve you, Ferguson," said Miles.

"Yes," said the Scotchman, soberly. "I minded the loss of money, but the
loss of confidence was a sore thought too, after all the trust I had put
in that man."

Presently Miles rose to go.

"I'll take care of your money, Tom," he said, "and do my best to get it
safely to your father."

"Thank you, John."

As Miles left the tent, he did not observe a crouching figure on the
other side of it. It was the figure of Bill Crane, a crony of Missouri
Jack, in fact, the man who helped him to fleece poor Peabody of his
scanty hoard.

Bill looked after Miles enviously.

"I wonder how much money he's got?" thought Bill. "I'd like some of it,
for I'm bust. I must tell Jack. I don't dare to tackle him alone."

CHAPTER IV.

A FOILED ROBBER.

In the grand rush to the newly discovered gold-fields all classes were
represented. There were men of education, representatives of all the
learned professions, men versed in business, and along with them
adventurers and men of doubtful antecedents, graduates of prisons and
penitentiaries. Bill Crane, introduced in the last chapter, belonged to
the latter undesirable class. He had served a term at Sing-Sing as a
housebreaker, and later another term in a Western penitentiary. He had
come to California with a prejudice against honest labor, and a
determination to make a living by the use of the peculiar talents on
which he had hitherto relied. He had spent a week at River Bend, chiefly
at the saloon of Missouri Jack, whom he found a congenial spirit, and
had picked up a little money from flats like the young Bostonian; but,
on the whole, he had found it an unprofitable field for the exercise of
his special talents.

"I must make a raise somehow," he bethought himself, "and then I'll make
tracks for some other settlement."

Precisely how to raise the fund of wh