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 called. "And yet, if I bring anybody with me Adam John is likely to resent it and develop a sullen streak."

"You've got to go across alone," foresaw Quackenbaugh. "Nobody along but your engineer. When you're landed; the boat will go back and pick up the man with the shotgun and just keep casually circling the island. If anybody tries to leave it before you he will suspect something is wrong and investigate."

"All right," smiled Henry with resolution; "if you want to risk your forty thousand I'm willing."

"You try him first with ten of those bills and then you keep trying another and another till you get up to twenty. Twenty is the absolute limit!" The squirrel teeth of Quackenbaugh closed like the click of a steel trap. "If it's a question of more than twenty we don't pay anything. We fight! But if he doesn't fall for twenty thousand in pretty pictures, then you turn the gold loose at him."

So simply did Quackenbaugh conceive the matter. He wrote quickly "$20,000 currency $20,000 gold," on a piece of paper worth a fraction of a cent with a pen worth less than a nickel, scrawled his initials beneath and handed it to Henry.

But there was a little matter to be adjusted between Henry Harrington and James H. Gaylord, the matter of a necessary poke to the banker's jaw from the lawyer's fist, delivered some three days ago. This adjustment took time and it was all of eighteen minutes after Henry entered Gaylord's private office before that lithe, muscled young man stepped across the sidewalk with his spine stiffened by the weight of sixty-eight pounds contained in a coin sack with the seal of the U. S. mint upon it. This sack reposed upon his shoul-