as been done to him. I cannot, as
a caballero, do that without your permission. It is for that purpose I
am here."

It needed only this last blow to complete the humiliation that whitened
Mulrady's face. But his eye was none the less clear and his voice none
the less steady as he turned to Don Caesar.

"You know perfectly the contents of that letter?"

"I have kept a copy of it."

"Come with me."

He preceded his visitor down the staircase and back into his private
office. Slinn looked up at his employer's face in unrestrained
anxiety. Mulrady sat down at his desk, wrote a few hurried lines, and
rang a bell. A manager appeared from the counting-room.

"Send that to the bank."

He wiped his pen as methodically as if he had not at that moment
countermanded the order to pay his daughter's dowry, and turned quietly
to Slinn.

"Don Caesar Alvarado has found the letter you wrote your wife on the
day you made your strike in the tunnel that is now my shaft. He gave
the letter to Mrs. Mulrady; but he has kept a copy."

Unheeding the frightened gesture of entreaty from Slinn, equally with
the unfeigned astonishment of Don Caesar, who was entirely unprepared
for this revelation of Mulrady's and Slinn's confidences, he continued,
"He has brought the copy with him. I reckon it would be only square
for you to compare it with what you remember of the original."

In obedience to a gesture from Mulrady, Don Caesar mechanically took
from his pocket a folded paper, and handed it to the paralytic. But
Slinn's trembling fingers could scarcely unfold the paper; and as his
eyes fell upon its contents, his convulsive lips could not articulate a
word.

"P'raps I'd better read it for you," said Mulrady, gently. "You kin
follow me and stop me when I go wrong."

He took the paper, and, in dead silence, read as follows:--

"DEAR WIFE,--I've just struck gold in my tunnel, and you must get ready
to come here with the children, at once. It was after six months' hard
work; and I'm so weak I . . . It's a fortune for us all. We should be
rich even if it were only a branch vein dipping west towards the next
tunnel, instead of dipping east, according to my theory--"

"Stop!" said Slinn, in a voice that shook the room.

Mulrady looked up.

"It's wrong, ain't it?" he asked, anxiously; "it should be EAST towards
the next tunnel."

"No! IT'S RIGHT! I am wrong! We're all wrong!"

Slinn had risen to his feet, erect and insp