What is the trouble?"

"I'm afraid it means more than just trouble for me, Mr. Carrados." The
man had steady, half-closed eyes, with the suggestion of depth which
one notices in the eyes of those whose business it is to look out over
great expanses of land or water; they were turned towards Carrados's
face with quiet resignation in their frankness now. "I'm afraid it
spells disaster. I am a working engineer from the Mount Magdalena
district of Coolgardie. I don't want to take up your time with outside
details, so I will only say that about two years ago I had an
opportunity of acquiring a share in a very promising claim--gold, you
understand, both reef and alluvial. As the work went on I put more and
more into the undertaking--you couldn't call it a venture by that
time. The results were good, better than we had dared to expect, but
from one cause and another the expenses were terrible. We saw that it
was a bigger thing than we had bargained for and we admitted that we
must get outside help."

So far Mr. Draycott's narrative had proceeded smoothly enough under
the influence of the quiet despair that had come over the man. But at
this point a sudden recollection of his position swept him into a
frenzy of bitterness.

"Oh, what the blazes is the good of going over all this again!" he
broke out. "What can you or anyone else do anyhow? I've been robbed,
rooked, cleared out of everything I possess," and tormented by
recollections and by the impotence of his rage the unfortunate
engineer beat the oak table with the back of his hand until his
knuckles bled.

Carrados waited until the fury had passed.

"Continue, if you please, Mr. Draycott," he said. "Just what you
thought it best to tell me is just what I want to know."

"I'm sorry, sir," apologized the man, colouring under his tanned skin.
"I ought to be able to control myself better. But this business has
shaken me. Three times last night I looked down the barrel of my
revolver, and three times I threw it away.... Well, we arranged that I
should come to London to interest some financiers in the property. We
might have done it locally or in Perth, to be sure, but then, don't
you see, they would have wanted to get control. Six weeks ago I landed
here. I brought with me specimens of the quartz and good samples of
extracted gold, dust and nuggets, the clearing up of several weeks'
working, about two hundred and forty ounces in all. That includes the
Magdalena Lodestar,