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Rh Doodle Glory. I have heard a lot about it, and I am frightfully curious by nature."

Tom was frankly astonished. He knew that the sensation of the ore strike in his mine was no longer a matter of absorbing interest to any one, and so he said: "Why, that’s ancient history."

"Perhaps to you, the Americans. But not to" The Baron checked himself quickly. He bit his lips as if trying to cut off the word he had been about to pronounce. He seemed strangely flustered for a moment, and his English, usually so carefully modulated, so ultra-British in every delicate shade of inflection, suddenly took on a thick, rasping, guttural tang.

"You see," he stammered, "the papers say a good deal about it, and"

Tom Graves took pity on the other's evident embarrassment. He had no idea why the man should be ill at ease, and he dismissed the fact of it as some mad, inexplicable, foreign idiosyncrasy.

"Sure," he said, "that unknown metal. I get you," and he did not notice that the German, at the words, had turned slightly pale and was studying him intently from beneath his lowered eyelids.

"Well," Tom went on, "have a bit of breakfast, and then I'll take you round to the diggings and you can gopher about there to your heart's content."

He said it laughingly. For all at once it had struck him that he had every reason in the world to he glad of the other's presence here in the Hoodoos. As long as he was here, he was away from Bertha Wedekind, and that was a point gained, And so, his native hospitality fired by his love, his jealousy, his self-interest, Tom set about preparing breakfast. He heated up the coffee, threw half-a-dozen slices of fat pork sizzling into