Page:Raymond Spears--Diamond Tolls.djvu/57

 of the finds on the cruiser from her viewpoint were not the diamonds, but a complete set of maps which were bound in a single volume, each sheet showing a section of the river from Lake Itasca to The Passes—every sheet numbered and all the sections indexed on several small-scale maps. There on No. 1 was Cairo, III., at the forks of the Ohio.

"The jumping-off place!" she mused, smiling with approval.

She found her own location on one of the inch-to-the-mile sheets and, though she felt as if she had travelled for ages on the river, her distance from the Ohio was less than seventy miles. Only seventy miles! In that short stretch she had definitely passed out of an old life into a novel one.

Not for an instant did she regret what she had done. Much that she liked had been of course given over for something that she loved and could not do without. She was doing even better than she had ever dreamed of doing—expenses were ridiculously small. The money and treasure in precious stones were a safeguard against any future worry from the question of income, should she determine to her own satisfaction that she must retain them.

She debated the matter of the gems frankly enough in her own mind. They were not hers. They were