sh coming
in for you--regularly every month. It will pay from the start four or
five times the amount necessary to keep everything else afloat. Jim
Reckett has taken the entire lower floor at thirty thousand. The offices
upstairs will pay from a thousand a month up and they are every one
rented in advance. Once we get our rents coming in, the strain is
relieved. I can begin to take up my mortgages and loans, and once that
is begun we are on the road to Millionaireville."

Once more he recapitulated his affairs--the land on the Plaza two
hundred thousand; the building eighty thousand; the Harbour View lands
anything they might rise to, but nearly a quarter million now; ten
thousand par value of the wharf stock already paying dividends; real
estate here and there and everywhere in the path of the city's growth;
shares in a new hotel that must soon touch par; the plank road--as we
jotted down the figures, and the magic total grew, such trifling little
affairs as gold mines dropped quite below the horizon. We stared at
Talbot fascinated.

And then for the first time we learned that the five thousand dollars we
had sent down from Hangman's Gulch, and the sum left from the robbery,
was not slumbering in some banker's safe, but had been sent dancing with
the other dollars at Talbot's command.

"I didn't know just what you fellows intended," said he, "but we were
partners up there at the mines, and I concluded it would be all right.
You didn't mean----"

"Sure not!" broke in Johnny heartily. "You're welcome to mine."

"Same here," agreed Yank and I.

And then Talbot let us see that he considered us to that extent partners
in the business.

"I have the date it arrived," he told us, "and I know just how much
actual capital I had myself at that time. So I'm computing your shares
in the venture on that basis. It comes to about one tenth apiece for
Yank and Johnny. Frank and I have an agreement already."

Johnny stared at the paper on which the totals had been pencilled.

"Not any!" he protested vehemently. "It isn't fair! You've made this
thing by sheer genius, and it isn't fair for me to take a tenth of it on
the strength of a measly little consignment of gold dust. You give me
your note for a thousand dollars--or whatever the sum is--at interest,
if you want to, and that's all that is coming to me."

"I feel the same," said Yank.

"Boys," argued Talbot earnestly, "that doesn't go. That five thousand
saved me. It cam