Page:Raymond Spears--Diamond Tolls.djvu/161

 anywhere, and Macrado had paid half of the cost. The boat was as nothing, however, to the money-belt. Frest had declared five or ten thousand dollars was not enough for any man, and Macrado had skillfully persuaded him to draw his money out of the bank. He now counted the money by light of a pocket flash while he steered the launch up midstream.

There were hundred, fifty, twenty, and ten-dollar bills in the hoard. He counted them slowly, with considerable difficulty, for Macrado was not educated or used to handling large sums of money. When he had counted the money, so many hundred-dollar bills, so many fifties, so many twenties and tens, he added up the amount with a pencil on a stick of wood—the pencil had been Frest's for similar service in arithmetic. He read the figures with satisfaction, $8,640.

"It'd cost a man two dollars a week to live," he reckoned, and he worked a sum in life right there. The money would last, at that rate, more than four thousand weeks, or about eighty years.

The discovery dazzled Macrado for a time. He could not believe that he had more money than he would need for his own life, even should he live to be a hundred years of age. He had lived long on meagre supplies—far more meagre than one would believe. He had known hunger and privation. He had found