discoveries
failed to command newspaper space.

This phenomenon was chiefly due to the fact that Whitaker didn't care to
raise an outcry about his loss. Ember, it seemed, had guessed shrewdly:
Drummond had appropriated to his own uses every dollar of the small
fortune left in his care by his erstwhile partner. No other client of
his had suffered, however. His peculations had been confined wholly to
the one quarter whence he had had every reason to anticipate neither
protest nor exposure. In Whitaker's too-magnanimous opinion, the man had
not been so much a thief as one who yielded to the temptation to convert
to his own needs and uses a property against which, it appeared, no
other living being cared to enter a claim.

Whether or not he had ever learned or guessed that Sara Law was the wife
of Whitaker, remained problematic. Whitaker inclined to believe that
Drummond had known--that he had learned the truth from the lips of his
betrothed wife. But this could not be determined save through her. And
she kept close hidden.

The monetary loss was an inconsiderable thing to a man with an interest
in mines in the Owen Stanley country. He said nothing. Drummond's name
remained untarnished, save in the knowledge of a few.

Of these, Martin Ember was one. Whitaker made a point of hunting him up.
The retired detective received confirmation of his surmise without any
amazement.

"You still believe that he's alive?"

"Implicitly," Ember asserted with conviction.

"Could you find him, if necessary?"

"Within a day, I think. Do you wish me to?"

"I don't know..."

Ember permitted Whitaker to consider the matter in silence for some
moments. Then, "Do you want advice?" he inquired.

"Well?"

"Hunt him down and put him behind the bars," said Ember instantly.

"What's the good of that?"

"Your personal safety."

"How?"

"Don't you suppose he misses all he's been accustomed to?--living as he
does in constant terror of being discovered, the life of a hunted thing,
one of the under-world, an enemy of society! Don't you suppose he'd be
glad to regain all he's lost--business, social position, the esteem of
his friends, the love of a woman who will soon be free to marry him?"

"Well?"

"With you out of the way, he could come back without fear."

"Oh--preposterous!"

"_Is_ it?"

"Drummond's not that sort. He's weak, perhaps, but no criminal."

"A criminal is the creature of a warped judgment. There'd be no
crimin