asn't any finger, it couldn't point anywheres, and we
should worry.

But just the same all the way home, whenever we started a camp-fire, we'd
look into it and kind of see an old soldier with white hair and a blue
coat and then we'd see a young fellow, wearing khaki, and a ring with
Lincoln's head cut on it.

In the fire we made near Orange Lake just before we hit Newburgh, we saw a
soldier in a kind of a restaurant where there were a lot of sailors and we
saw them take something away from him. But that's always the way it is with
camp-fires. Mostly we saw the old soldier.

Harry Donnelle always laughed about it and said the camp-fire was a regular
art gallery and he guessed he'd give that unlucky two hundred dollars to an
orphan asylum, or to the widows and orphans of the poor garage keepers or
to the destitute Standard Oil Company. So it got to be a kind of a joke,
and that's the way it was till the whole thing was solved. And I'm going to
tell you all about it, too, but I can't bother now, because I have to tell
you about our hike and the crazy thing that happened next day.

CHAPTER XVII

APPALLING! WONDERFUL! MAGNIFICENT!

Anyway, there was one person we never saw in the camp-fire blaze and that
was Mr. Costello. If we had, we wouldn't have seen the blaze. He was so big
that he would have filled the whole fire. Harry Donnelle said he could even
have blown a camp-fire out if he wanted to-even the big one at Temple Camp.

I wasn't awake when Dorry started for Kingston in the morning, so I didn't
hear him go. But I knew when he came back all right. If I hadn't known it,
it would have been because I was dead.

He got back before noon and the first I saw of him he was sitting on a big,
high fancy seat of a cage wagon, wedged in alongside a great big man with a
high hat on and a cutaway coat and a red Vest. The big man was driving and
the two horses had sleigh bells on them and fancy harness and they made an
awful racket. They were dandy white horses, though. Dorry looked awful
scared and little alongside the big man. The cage wagon was all gold color
and fancy on the top and the wheels looked like Fourth of July pinwheels.

Harry said, "Mr. Costello doesn't exactly look as if he had sneaked off,
does he? He's not ashamed to be seen. What's that, a searchlight?"

I said, "No, it's a diamond; he's got diamonds all over him. Somebody must
have sprinkled him with diamonds before he started. He had them everywher