ters of its
present holdings.

He tried to see O'Hara, but the lumberman refused to be interviewed, and
promptly began proceedings. He also made his will; for he was a sick
man. Then he became a sicker man, and suspended proceedings and sent for
his little daughter.

Before she arrived he called Munn in, gave him a packet of papers, and
made him burn them before his eyes.

"They're the papers in my case," he said. "I'm dying; I've fought too
hard. I don't want my child to fight when I'm dead. And there's nothing
in my claim, anyway." This was a lie, and Munn suspected it.

When the child, Eileen, arrived, O'Hara was nearly dead, but he gathered
sufficient strength to shove a locked steel box towards his daughter and
tell her to keep it from Munn, and keep it locked until she found an
honest man in the world.

The next morning O'Hara appeared to be much better. His friend Munn came
to see him; also came Peyster Sprowl in some alarm, on the matter of the
proceedings threatened. But O'Hara turned his back on them both and
calmly closed his eyes and ears to their presence.

Munn went out of the room, but laid his large, thin ear against the
door. Sprowl worried O'Hara for an hour, but, getting no reply from the
man in the bed, withdrew at last with considerable violence.

O'Hara, however, had fooled them both: he had been dead all the while.

The day after the funeral, Sprowl came back to look for O'Hara's
daughter; and as he peeped into the door of the squalid flat he saw a
thin, yellow-eyed young man, with a bony face, all furry in promise of
future whiskers, rummaging through O'Hara's effects. This young
gentleman was Munn.

In a dark corner of the disordered room sat the child, Eileen, a white,
shadowy elf of six, reading in the Book of Common Prayer.

Sprowl entered the room; Munn looked up, then coolly continued to
rummage.

Sprowl first addressed himself to the child, in a heavy, patronizing
voice:

"It's too dark to read there in that corner, young one. Take your book
out into the hall."

"I can see better to read in the dark," said the child, lifting her
great, dark-blue eyes.

"Go out into the hall," said Sprowl, sharply.

The child shrank back, and went, taking her little jacket in one hand,
her battered travelling-satchel in the other.

If the two men could have known that the steel box was in that satchel
this story might never have been told. But it never entered their heads
that the pall