I.

He lifted up one of them by the end and let it fall ker-bang!

"Not here," says he.

"Try the other," says I, with a sudden sinking.

He let that crash, too, and turning around, looked me in the face.

"Good God, Tom!" said I.

"Just what I suspected all along," said Tom, as savage as a tiger. "He's
made way with it!"

We didn't stop to speak another word, but rummaged the whole room upside
down.

"He's buried it," says Tom, savager than ever, "and what kind of a
bastard was you to let him?"

"It was none of my business," says I.

"None of your business!" he repeated, screaming out at me like a
woman--"to have a quarter of a million by the tail and let it go? You
might have been slack about your own half, but it was a swine's trick
not to keep track of mine!"

"He can't have taken it very far," I said.

"Not far!" yelled Tom, making an insult of every word I said. "Why, what
was to prevent him lugging away a little this day and that, till the
whole caboodle was sunk in a solid block? What do you suppose he was
doing with the lantern, you tom-fool? Planting it, of course--planting
every dollar of it, night after night, while you were snoozing in your
silly bed."

"If it's anywhere it's in the Kanaka graveyard," says I. "I'll go bail
it's within ten feet of where we found his dead body."

"Did you stake the place?" says Tom.

I was ashamed to tell him I hadn't even thought of the money, being
struck all of a heap, and always powerful fond of Old Dibs.

"It would serve you right if I made you dig up the whole graveyard,
single-handed," said Tom; "and if you had a spark of proper feeling,
Bill Hargus, you'd fall on your knees and beg my parding for having
acted like such a damned ninny!"

I would have answered him back in his own coin if I hadn't felt so bad
about it all, and rattled, besides. I had punched Tom's head often and
often, and he had punched mine; but I was staggered by the money being
missing, and the loss of it just seemed to swallow up everything else.
Somehow, it had never seemed _my_ money till then, and the more I felt
it mine the more galling it was to give it up. Tom relented when he saw
how cut up I was, withdrawing all the hard things he had said, and going
on the other tack to cheer me up. He said he was just as big an ass as I
was, and came out handsome about its being both our fault, and how it
didn't matter a hill of beans anyway, for we'd soon get our spades on to
it. I