ess you; you're welcome to them," hastily. "No wonder that day in my
library you spoke as you did about books. 'Gad! it's wonderful! But you
say at first you could hardly read? Your life, then, as a boy--pardon
me; it's not mere idle curiosity."

"As a boy!" John Steele repeated the words almost mechanically. "My
parents died when I was a child; they came of good stock--New England."
He uttered the last part of the sentence involuntarily; stopped. "I was
bound out, was beaten. I fought, ran away. In lumber camps, the drunken
riffraff cursed the new scrub boy; on the Mississippi, the sailors and
stevedores kicked him because the mate kicked them. Everywhere it was
the same; the boy learned only one thing, to fight. Fight, or be beaten!
On the plains, in the mountains, before the fo'castle, it was the same.
Fight, or--" he broke off. "It was not a boyhood; it was a contention."

"I believe you." Sir Charles' accents were half-musing. "And if you will
pardon me, I'll stake a good deal that you fought straight." He paused.
"But to go back to your isle, your magic isle, if you please. You were
rescued, and then?"

"In a worldly sense, I prospered; in New Zealand, in Tasmania. Fate, as
if to atone for having delayed her favors, now lavished them freely;
work became easy; a mine or two that I was lucky enough to locate,
yielded, and continues to yield, unexpected returns. Without especially
desiring riches, I found myself more than well-to-do."

"And then having fairly, through your own efforts, won a place in the
world, having conquered fortune, why did you return to England knowing
the risk, that some one of these fellows like Gillett, the police agent,
might--"

"Why," said John Steele, "because I wished to sift, to get to the very
bottom of this crime for which I was convicted. For all real
wrong-doing--resisting officers of the law--offenses against
officialdom--I had paid the penalty, in full, I believe. But this other
matter--that was different. It weighed on me through those years on the
island and afterward. A jury had convicted me wrongfully; but I had to
prove it; to satisfy myself, to find out beyond any shadow of a doubt,
and--"

"He did." For the first time Captain Forsythe spoke. "Steele has in his
possession full proofs of his innocence and I have seen them; they go to
show that he suffered through the cowardice of a miserable cad, a titled
scoundrel who struck his hand from the gunwale of the boat when t