ft her, Kelson had added
another thousand dollars to his hoard.

That evening, close to the Academy of Science in Market Street, he saw
a lady get out of a taxi and quickly enter a pawnbroker's. Her whole
life at once rose up before him. She was Ella Crockford, the wife of
the Californian Street Sugar King, and, unknown to her husband, she
spent her afternoons at a gambling saloon in Kearney Street, where she
ran through thousands.

She was now about to pledge her husband's latest present to her--a
diamond tiara, one of the most notable pieces of jewellery in the
country--in the hope that she would soon win back sufficient money at
cards to redeem it.

Kelson stopped her as she came out, and in a marvellously few words,
proved to her that he knew everything. Her amazement was beyond
description.

"You must be a magician," she said, "because I'm certain no one saw me
take my jewel-case out of the drawer--no one was in the room! And as I
put it in my muff immediately, no one could have seen it as I left the
house. Besides, I never told a soul I intended pawning it, so how is
it possible you could know--and be able to repeat the whole of the
conversation I had with Walter Le-Grand, to whom I lost so heavily
last night? Tell me, how do you know all this?"

But Kelson would tell her nothing--nothing beyond her own sins and
misfortunes.

"I have nothing to give you," she told him. "I dare not ask my husband
for more money."

"What, nothing!" Kelson replied, "When the pawnbroker has just
advanced you fifty thousand dollars. You call that nothing? Be pleased
to give me one thousand, and congratulate yourself that I do not ask
for all your 'nothing.'" And as neither tears nor prayers had any
effect, she was obliged to pay him the sum he asked.

Flushed and excited with victory, and thinking, perhaps, that he had
done enough for one day, Kelson took his spoils to a bank near the
Palace Hotel, and for the first time in his career opened a banking
account. As he was leaving the building he ran into Hamar, bent on a
similar errand. The two gleefully compared notes.

"I thought," Hamar said, "my turn would never come, and that I must
have done something to get out of favour with the Unknown; but as I
was sitting in the Pig and Whistle Saloon in Corn Street drinking a
lager, I suddenly felt a peculiar throbbing sensation run up my left
leg into my left hand, and the floor seemed to open up, and I saw deep
below me, in a b