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Rh in the fact, and the disgrace in the publicity. You must set the whole station commenting on your scandal."

"That's just what the whole station is doing at the present time," replied my legate unctuously. "Surprising how these things spread of themselves, when they 're once fairly started. And everybody believes the yarn; bar Mooney, and Nelson, and myself; and you can depend your life on us to keep it jigging. No, I'm wrong; Montgomery's got the inside crook on us."

"Montgomery?" said I inquiringly.

"Yes. I got a fright over that," explained the diplomatist. "The other morning, I was at some correspondence here, and I heard a quick step, and when I looked up, who should I see but Montgomery, as black as thunder.

"'Moriarty!' says he, in a voice that made me jump; 'what is this story I hear of Collins? Now, no shuffling,' says he; 'I've traced it home to you, and I want your authority. I always looked upon Collins as a decent sort of oddity,' says he; 'and I'm determined to sift this matter thoroughly.' Frightened me out of a year's growth." Moriarty paused, and drew a long breath.

"Well?" said I, hazily; wondering whether this piteous wreckage of plot was owing to some defect in my own strategy, or to bad lieutenantry in the working out.

"So I had to make a clean breast of it," continued the plenipotentiary, in a reluctant and apologetic tone. "No use talking. It was impossible to stand to the yarn, when Montgomery's eye was on me—let alone being taken by surprise. It was dragged from me by a sort of hypodermic influence; and all the fun seemed to have died out of it, till it sounded mean and small and unmanly. Yes; I had to tell him the fix you were in, and the commission you had given me, and everything from first to last; bar that infernal wager. Well, you know, Montgomery never laughs; but I saw his face twitching, once or twice; and before I had done, he wheeled round and stood looking out of the door, as if I was n't worth listening to. Then he went away, coughing fit to break his neck."

"I may thank him for being tree'd, in the first place; and he knows it," I remarked, with a sourness which appears pardonable even at this distance of time.

"What had he got to do with it?" asked Moriarty.

"How the tempus does fugit!" I replied. For the mid-day bell was ringing at the hut.

"Best sound since breakfast-time," said Moriarty, rising. "Come on to lunch."

As we left the store, half-a-dozen representatives of the lower classes were stringing-in from different directions toward the hut, to attend to the most ancient and eminent of human institutions—the institution which predicates and affirms the brotherhood of our race as positively, and, to the philosophic mind, as touchingly, as death itself; being recognised and remembered by the aristocrat who forgets his own personal dirt-origin and dirt-destination; by the woman who forgets the date of her birth; by the