ng round to the front door, essayed to re-enter the
concert-room.

"Pay here, please," cried the money-taker, in an extremely nasal tone,
as he passed the little hole in the wall.

"I've paid already," answered Larry.

"Shew your check, then."

"Sure I don't know what that is."

The doorkeeper smiled contemptuously, and shut down with a bang the bar
that kept off the public. Larry doubled his fist, and flushed crimson;
then he remembered the importance of the business he had on hand, and
quietly drew the requisite sum from his leather purse.

"Come along," said he to Ned Sinton, on re-entering the room. "I've
see'd her; an' Bill Jones, too!"

"Bill Jones!" cried Ned and the captain simultaneously.

"Whist!" said Larry; "don't be makin' people obsarve us. Come along
home; it's all right--I'll tell ye all about it when we're out."

In another minute the three friends were in the street, conversing
eagerly and earnestly as they hastened to their quarters through the
thronged and noisy streets of Sacramento.

CHAPTER TWENTY SIX.

DEEP PLOTS AND PLANS--BILL JONES RELATES HIS MISADVENTURES--MADEMOISELLE
NELINA CONSENTS TO RUN OFF WITH LARRY O'NEIL--A YANKEE MUSICIAN
OUTWITTED--THE ESCAPE.

As Larry had rightly anticipated, Bill Jones made his appearance at the
City Hotel the moment the concert was over, and found his old comrades
waiting anxiously for him.

It did not take long to tell him how they had discovered the existence
of Nelly Morgan, as we shall now call her, but it took much longer to
drag from Bill the account of his career since they last met, and the
explanation of how he came to be placed in his present circumstances.

"Ye see, friends," said he, puffing at a pipe, from which, to look at
him, one would suppose he derived most of his information, "this is how
it happened. When I set sail from the diggin's to come here for grub, I
had a pleasant trip at first. But after a little things began to look
bad; the feller that steered us lost his reckoning, an' so we took two
or three wrong turns by way o' makin' short cuts. That's always how it
Is. There's a proverb somewhere--"

"In Milton, maybe, or Napier's book o' logarithms," suggested Captain
Bunting.

"P'r'aps it wos, and p'r'aps it wosn't," retorted Bill, stuffing the end
of his little finger, (if such a diminutive may be used in reference to
any of his fingers), into the bowl of his pipe. "I raither think myself
it wos in _Bell