scent only made him the more
sharply aware that this strange mantel had left its moorings as though
on greased rollers.

His heart playing a sudden drum-beat, he threw the carven timber from
him and bounded to his feet. The first flying glance showed him the
strange truth: his blundering feet had marvelously stumbled into his
father's arcana. For he looked, not at an unsightly mass of splintered
laths and torn wall-paper and shattered plaster, but into as neat a
little cupboard as a man could wish.

The cupboard was as wide as the mantel itself; lined and ceiled with a
dark red wood which beautifully threw back the glare of the dancing
gas-jet. It was half-full of things, old books, letters, bundles of
papers held together with rubber bands, canvas bags--all grouped and
piled in the most orderly way about a large tin dispatch-box. This box
drew the young man's gaze like a sudden shout; he was hardly on his feet
before he had sprung forward and jerked it out. Instantly the
treacherous bricks threw him again; sprawled on the floor he seized one
of them and smashed through the hasp at a blow.

Bit by bit the illuminating truth came out. In all his own calculations,
close and exact as he had thought them, he had lost sight of one simple
but vital fact. In the years that he had been in prison, his father had
spent no money beyond the twenty-five dollars a month to Tim Queed; and
comparatively little in the years of his wanderings. In all this time
the interest upon his "nest-egg" had been steadily accumulating. Five
per cent railroad bonds, and certificates of deposit in four different
banks, were the forms in which the money had been tucked away, by what
devilish cleverness could only be imagined. But the simple fact was that
his father had died worth not less than two hundred thousand dollars and
probably more. And this did not include the house, which, it appeared,
his father had bought, and not leased as he said; nor did it include
four thousand four hundred dollars in gold and banknotes which he found
in the canvas sacks after his first flying calculation was made.

Early in the morning, when the newsboys were already crying the _Post_
upon the streets, young Henry Surface came at last upon the will. It was
very brief, but entirely clear and to the point. His father had left to
him without conditions, everything of which he died possessed. The will
was dated in June of the previous summer--he recalled a two days'
ab