p.

"Why, say, old Noah, did you ever see that kid?" at length demanded the
reader, with a keen look of suspicion.

It was the inimical expression, rather than a definite consciousness of
self-betrayal, that sent the old man's drifting mind back to its
moorings. "Jes' listenin' ter that beautiful readin'," he grinned, his
long yellow tobacco-stained teeth all bare in a facial contortion that
essayed a smile, his distended lips almost failing of articulation. "Them
was fine clothes sure on that lovely child."

The flamboyant advertisements had often before been read aloud in the
construction camp, and the matter might have passed as the half-fevered
babblings of a sick old man, but for that look of stultified comment, of
anguished foreboding, that was interchanged between the two accomplices.
Only one man, however, had the keen observation to catch that fleeting
signal, and the enterprise to seek to interpret it.

The next day, when Clenk did not reappear, this man quietly slipped to
the shack where the three lived together. There was a padlock knocking in
the wind on the flimsy door. This said as plain as speech that there was
no one within. Ordinarily this would have precluded all question, all
entrance. But the intruder was seeking a pot of gold, and informed by a
strong suspicion. With one effort of his brawny hands, he pulled loose
from the top first the strap of one of the broad upright boards that
formed the walls, then the board itself. He turned sideways and slipped
his bulk through the aperture, the board swinging elastically back into
place.

There was a stove in the squalid little apartment, instead of the open
fires common to the region. It was masked in a dusky twilight, but as his
eyes became accustomed to the obscurity and the disorder, his suspicion
exhaled, and a heavy sense of disappointment clogged his activities like
a ball and chain.

There in his bunk lay Clenk, his eyes shining with the light of fever,
his illness affording an obvious explanation of the precaution of his
comrades in locking the door while they were away at work, at the limits
of the construction line, to protect him from molestation by man or
beast.

Nevertheless, the intruder made an effort to hold his theory together. He
approached the bunk, and with an insidious craft sought to draw the old
man out. But Clenk was now on his guard. His comrades had bitterly
upbraided him with his self-betrayal, that indeed threatened the