re a couple of old game
licenses for Manitoba, half a dozen pencil-marked maps, chiefly of the
Peace River country, and a number of letters from the secretaries of
Boards of Trade pointing out the incomparable possibilities their
respective districts held for the homesteader and the buyer of land.
Last of all came a number of newspaper clippings and a packet of
letters.

Because they were loose he seized upon the clippings first, and as his
eyes fell upon the first paragraph of the first clipping his body
became suddenly tensed in the shock of unexpected discovery and amazed
interest. There were six of the clippings, all from English papers,
English in their terseness, brief as stock exchange reports, and
equally to the point. He read the six in three minutes.

They simply stated that Derwent Conniston, of the Connistons of
Darlington, was wanted for burglary--and that up to date he had not
been found.

Keith gave a gasp of incredulity. He looked again to see that his eyes
were not tricking him. And it was there in cold, implacable print.
Derwent Conniston--that phoenix among men, by whom he had come to
measure all other men, that Crichton of nerve, of calm and audacious
courage, of splendid poise--a burglar! It was cheap, farcical, an
impossible absurdity. Had it been murder, high treason, defiance of
some great law, a great crime inspired by a great passion or a great
ideal, but it was burglary, brigandage of the cheapest and most
commonplace variety, a sneaking night-coward's plagiarism of real
adventure and real crime. It was impossible. Keith gritted the words
aloud. He might have accepted Conniston as a Dick Turpin, a Claude
Duval or a Macheath, but not as a Jeremy Diddler or a Bill Sykes. The
printed lines were lies. They must be. Derwent Conniston might have
killed a dozen men, but he had never cracked a safe. To think it was to
think the inconceivable.

He turned to the letters. They were postmarked Darlington, England. His
fingers tingled as he opened the first. It was as he had expected, as
he had hoped. They were from Mary Josephine. He arranged them--nine in
all--in the sequence of their dates, which ran back nearly eight years.
All of them had been written within a period of eleven months. They
were as legible as print. And as he passed from the first to the
second, and from the second to the third, and then read on into the
others, he forgot there was such a thing as time and that Mary
Josephine was