ave
taken too much for granted once more. Perhaps Elihu Quackenboss
carried off your dispatch-box!"

"You fool," Charles answered, in his most unamiable manner (he
applies that word to me with increasing frequency); "is _that_ what
you've waked me up for? Why, the Quackenbosses left Lake George
on Tuesday morning, and I had the dispatch-box in my own hands
on Wednesday."

"We have only their word for it," I cried. "Perhaps they stopped
on--and walked off with it afterwards!"

"We will inquire to-morrow," Charles answered. "But I confess I
don't think it was worth waking me up for. I could stake my life
on that little woman's integrity."

We _did_ inquire next morning--with this curious result: it turned
out that, though the Quackenbosses had left the Lakeside Hotel on
Tuesday, it was only for the neighbouring Washington House, which
they quitted on Wednesday morning, taking the same train for
Saratoga which Charles and I had intended to go by. Mrs. Quackenboss
carried a small brown paper parcel in her hands--in which, under the
circumstances, we had little difficulty in recognising Charles's
dispatch-box, loosely enveloped.

Then I knew how it was done. The chambermaid, loitering about the
room for a tip, was--Mrs. Quackenboss! It needed but an apron to
transform her pretty travelling-dress into a chambermaid's costume;
and in any of those huge American hotels one chambermaid more or
less would pass in the crowd without fear of challenge.

"We will follow them on to Saratoga," Charles cried. "Pay the bill
at once, Seymour."

"Certainly," I answered. "Will you give me some money?"

Charles clapped his hand to his pockets. "All, all in the
dispatch-box," he murmured.

That tied us up another day, till we could get some ready cash from
our agents in New York; for the manager, already most suspicious at
the change of name and the accusation of theft, peremptorily refused
to accept Charles's cheque, or anything else, as he phrased it,
except "hard money." So we lingered on perforce at Lake George in
ignoble inaction.

"Of course," I observed to my brother-in-law that evening, "Elihu
Quackenboss was Colonel Clay."

"I suppose so," Charles murmured resignedly. "Everybody I meet seems
to be Colonel Clay nowadays--except when I believe they _are_, in
which case they turn out to be harmless nobodies. But who would have
thought it was he after I pulled his hair out? Or after he persisted
in his trick, even when I