s determined to do his good deed and to get
no thanks or acknowledgment for it. Still, it seemed almost incredible.
His troubles began to melt away like bubbles in the sun; he thought of
the other fellows when they came in, and what he would have to tell
them; he thought of the German landlady and the arrears of rent, of
regular food and clean linen, and books and music, of the chance of
getting into some respectable business, of--well, of as many things as
it is possible to think of when excitement and surprise fling wide open
the gates of the imagination.

The man, meanwhile, began quietly to count over the packages aloud from
one to ten, and then to count the bills in each separate packet, also
from one to ten. Yes, there were ten little heaps, each containing ten
bills of a hundred-dollar denomination. That made ten thousand dollars.
Blake had never seen so much money in a single lump in his life before;
and for many months of privation and discomfort he had not known the
"feel" of a twenty-dollar note, much less of a hundred-dollar one. He
heard them crackle under the man's fingers, and it was like crisp
laughter in his ears. The bills were evidently new and unused.

But, side by side with the excitement caused by the shock of such an
event, Blake's caution, acquired by a year of vivid New York experience,
was meanwhile beginning to assert itself. It all seemed just a little
too much out of the likely order of things to be quite right. The police
courts had taught him the amazing ingenuity of the criminal mind, as
well as something of the plots and devices by which the unwary are
beguiled into the dark places where blackmail may be levied with
impunity. New York, as a matter of fact, just at that time was literally
undermined with the secret ways of the blackmailers, the green-goods
men, and other police-protected abominations; and the only weak point
in the supposition that this was part of some such proceeding was the
selection of himself--a poor newspaper reporter--as a victim. It did
seem absurd, but then the whole thing was so out of the ordinary, and
the thought once having entered his mind, was not so easily got rid of.
Blake resolved to be very cautious.

The man meanwhile, though he never appeared to raise his eyes from the
carpet, had been watching him closely all the time.

"If you will give me a receipt I'll leave the money at once," he said,
with just a vestige of impatience in his tone, as if he we