y luck." He laughed a
little. "I'm certainly catching Uncle Jefferson's superstitions. Perhaps
that's in the soil, too!"

He went into the house and to the library. The breeze through the
wide-flung bow-window was fluttering the papers on the desk and the map
on the wall was flapping sidewise. He went to straighten it, and then
saw what he had not noticed before--that it covered something that had
been let into the plaster. He swung it aside and made an exclamation.

He was looking at a square, uncompromising wall-safe, with a round
figured disk of white metal on its face. He knelt before it and tried
its knob. After a moment it turned easily. But the resolute steel door
would not open, though he tried every combination that came into his
mind. "No use," he said disgustedly. "One must have the right numbers."

Then he lifted his fretted frame and smote his grimy hands together.
"Confound it!" he said with a short laugh. "Here I am, a bankrupt, with
all this outfit--clear to the very finger-bowls--handed to me on a
silver tray, and I'm mad as scat because I can't open the first locked
thing I find!"

He ran up-stairs and donned a rough corduroy jacket and high leather
leggings. "We're going to climb the hill to-day, Chum," he announced,
"and no more moccasins need apply."

In the lower hall, however, he suddenly stopped stock-still. "The slip
of paper that was in the china dog!" he exclaimed. "What a chump I am
not to have thought of it!" He found it in its pigeonhole and, kneeling
down before the safe, tried the numbers carefully, first right, then
left: 17--28--94--0. The heavy door opened.

"I was right!" he exulted. "It's the plate." He drew it out, piece by
piece. Each was bagged in dark-red Canton flannel. He broke the tape of
one bag and exposed a great silver pitcher, tarnished purple-blue like a
raven's wing--then a tea-service. Each piece, large and small, was
marked with the greyhound rampant and the motto. "And to think," he
said, "that my great-great-grandfather buried you with his own hands
under the stables when Tarleton's raiders swept the valley before the
surrender at Yorktown! Only wait till Aunt Daphne gets you polished up,
and on the sideboard! You're the one thing the place has needed!"

* * * * *

With the dog for comrade he traversed the garden and plunged across the
valley below, humming as he went one of the songs with which Uncle
Jefferson was wont to reg