s must be paid for, and vainly
trying to discover what his last basket of wood might cost.

Yes, he told himself, he was a hunter out of his domain. He would
always feel intimidated and insecure in this land of aliens and
unknowns. He even sympathetically wondered who it was that had said:
"Foreigners are fools!" Then a sudden, irrational, inconsequential
sense of gratitude took possession of him, as he felt and heard the
woman at work so close beside him. There was a feeling of
companionship about it that made the double risk worth while.

"There's nothing here!" Frank was saying, under her breath.

"Then it _must_ be the box!" he told her.

Durkin knew it was already too late to file and fit a skeleton key.
His first impulse was to bury the box under a muffling pile of bedding
and send a bullet or two through the lock. But his wandering eye
caught sight of a Morocco sheath-knife above them on the wall, and a
moment later he had the point of it under the steel-bound lid, and as
he pried it flew open with a snap.

He waited, listening, and lighting matches, while Frank went through
the papers, with nervous and agile fingers, mumbling the inscriptions
as she hurriedly read and cast them away from her.

"I thought so!" she said at last, crisply.

The packet held half a dozen blueprints, together with some twelve or
fourteen sheets of plans and specifications, on tinted "flimsy."
Durkin noticed they were drawn up in red and black ink, and that at the
bottom of each document were paragraphs of finely-penned,
scholarly-looking writing. One glance was enough for them both.

Frank refolded them and caught them together with a rubber band. Then
she thrust them into the bosom of her dress. Both rose to their feet,
for both were filled with the selfsame sudden passion to get into the
open once more.

"That must go back, now!" whispered Frank, for Durkin was stooping down
again, over the leather bag that held the napoleons.

"Thank heaven," he answered gratefully, "it's not _that_!"

"Not _yet_!" she whispered back, bitterly, as she heard the chink and
rattle of metal in the darkness. But some day it might be.

Then she heard another sound, which caused her to catch quickly at
Durkin's arm. It was the sound of a key turning in the lock, followed
by an impatient little French oath, and the weight of a man's body
against the resisting door. Then the oath was repeated, and a second
key was turned, this time i