gnize me?"

"Wal, no," said Hervey, his drawl more pronounced than ever. "I haven't
got the memory for faces that you and the Don here seem to possess.
Huh!" He wheeled his chair and faced Braddock squarely. "I'd have
thought you wiser not to back up the Don, sir."

Braddock's little eyes sparkled.

"I am not afraid of you," said he with great contempt. "I never did
anything for which you could get money out of me for, Captain Hervey or
Gustav Vasa, or whatever your name might be."

"You were always a mighty spry man," assented the skipper coolly, "but
spry men, I take it, make mistakes from being too almighty smart."

Braddock shrugged his shoulders, and Don Pedro intervened.

"This is all beside the point," he remarked angrily. "Captain Hervey, do
you deny that you are Gustav Vasa in the face of this evidence?"

Hervey drew up the left sleeve of his reefer jacket, and showed on his
bared wrist the symbol of the sun and the encircling serpent.

"Is that enough?" he drawled, "or do you want to look at this?" and he
turned his head to reveal his scarred right temple.

"Then you admit that you are Vasa?"

"Wal," drawled the captain again, "that's one of my names, I guess,
though I haven't used it since I traded that blamed mummy in Paris,
thirty years ago. There's nothing like owning up."

"Are you not Swedish?" asked Lucy timidly.

"I am a citizen of the world, I guess," replied Hervey with great
politeness for him, "and America suits me for headquarters as well as
any other nation. I might be Swedish or Danish or a Dago for choice.
Vasa may be my name, or Hervey, or anything you like. But I guess I'm a
man all through."

"And a thief!" cried Don Pedro, who had resumed his seat, but was
keeping quiet with difficulty.

"Not of those emeralds," rejoined the skipper coolly: "Lord, to think
of the chance I missed! Thirty years ago I could have looted them,
and again the other day. But I never knew--I never knew," cried Hervey
regretfully, with his vividly blue eyes on the mummy. "I could jes' kick
myself, gentlemen, when I think of the miss."

"Then you didn't steal the manuscript along with the emeralds?"

"Wal, I did," cried Hervey, turning to Archie, who had spoken, "but it
was in a furren lingo, to which I didn't catch on. If I'd known I'd have
learned about those blamed emeralds."

"What did you do with the copy of the manuscript you stole?" asked Don
Pedro sharply. "I know there was a copy, as my fa