heavy timber platform six feet square
and lifted a foot and a half from the ground, which cumbered the
sidewalk nearest the curb. Storri surveyed the platform in a lack-luster
way. It had, from its appearance, been there years; it was strange he
had never noticed it before.

An old man, one of the night guards of the Treasury, buttoned to the
chin, was standing in a narrowish basement door-way of the great building
not fifteen feet away. The old man took his pipe out of his mouth, and
seeing Storri survey the obstructing platform, observed:

"If I had a sack or two of the billions of gold that's been dumped on
that platform, I wouldn't be smokin' my pipe 'round here to-night."

Gold as a term never failed to attract the Storri ear. He opened
converse with the old man of the pipe. It was to this heavy platform the
treasure-wagons backed up when they brought bullion to the Treasury.
Storri learned another thing that gave him the sort of thrill that
setters feel when in the near vicinity of a covey of grouse. The vault
that held the gold reserve was within sixty feet of him as he stood in
the street. Just inside those thick, hopeless walls they lay--millions
of piled-up yellow treasure. Storri stared hard at the impassive granite
and licked his lips. The nearness of those millions pleased him like
music.

"Sixty feet!" exclaimed Storri unctuously. "That doesn't sound far, but
before a robber pierced such a wall as that he would fancy it far
enough."

"Oh, a robber wouldn't try the wall," said the old man, turning to look
at it. "I've often wondered though that no one ever thought of the sewer
out there;" and the old man marked a line in the air with his pipe-stem
as though tracing the direction of the great street drain that ran
beneath the pavement.

Storri kept on his journey to the club, but the notion of those
millions, almost within hand's touch of the open street, continued to
haunt him pleasantly. The sewer, too! Would a tunnel reach this
treasure? The question used to come back upon Storri. Also he got into
the habit, as he went about the streets, of walking by the Treasury.
This was not offspring of any purpose; Storri had none. It was only that
he took an instinctive satisfaction in the nearness of that heaped-up
gold. He could feel its close neighborhood, and the feeling was as wine
to his imagination.

Storri was not permitted respite by the San Reve concerning the Harleys.
The jealous one of the green