rry Haight had gone to the hotel office for a few moments' rest and
a cigarette, and was nowhere in sight. But when the set broke, and
Miss Herrick, despairing of Jerry, had started out to favor one of
the younger ensigns, she suddenly jostled against him, pushing his way
eagerly across the floor in the direction of the musicians' platform.

"Oh!" she cried, "Mr. Haight, you've missed your chance--I've been
looking for you."

But Jerry did not hear--he seemed very excited. He crossed the floor,
almost running, and went up on the platform where the musicians were
meandering softly through the mazes of "La Paloma," and brought them to
an abrupt silence.

"Here, I say, Haight!" exclaimed Ridgeway, who was near by, "you can't
break up my figure like that."

"Gi' me a call there on the bugle," said Haight rapidly to the
cornetist. "Anything to make 'em keep quiet a moment."

The cornetist sounded a couple of notes, and the cotillon paused in
the very act of the break. The shuffling of feet grew still, and the
conversation ceased. A diamond brooch had been found, no doubt, or some
supper announcement was to be made. But Jerry Haight, with a great sweep
of his arm, the forgotten cigarette between his fingers, shouted out
breathlessly:

"Ross Wilbur is out in the office of the hotel!"

There was an instant's silence, and then a great shout. Wilbur found!
Ross Wilbur come back from the dead! Ross Wilbur, hunted for and
bootlessly traced from Buenos Ayres in the south to the Aleutian Islands
in the north. Ross Wilbur, the puzzle of every detective bureau on the
coast; the subject of a thousand theories; whose name had figured in the
scareheads of every newspaper west of the Mississippi. Ross Wilbur, seen
at a fashionable tea and his club of an afternoon, then suddenly blotted
out from the world of men; swallowed up and engulfed by the unknown,
with not so much as a button left behind. Ross Wilbur the suicide; Ross
Wilbur, the murdered; Ross Wilbur, victim of a band of kidnappers, the
hero of some dreadful story that was never to be told, the mystery, the
legend--behold he was there! Back from the unknown, dropped from the
clouds, spewed up again from the bowels of the earth--a veritable god
from the machine who in a single instant was to disentangle all the
unexplained complications of those past winter months.

"Here he comes!" shouted Jerry, his eyes caught by a group of men
in full dress and gold lace who came trampin