tell you a little story."

Bones listened to that story with compressed lips and folded arms. He
was neither shocked nor amazed, and the girl was surprised.

"Hold hard, young miss," he said soberly. "If this is a jolly old
swindle, and if the naughty mariner----"

"His name is Webber, and he is an actor," she interrupted.

"And dooced well he acted," admitted Bones. "Well, if this is so, what
about the other johnny who's putting up ten thousand to my fifteen
thousand?"

This was a facer for the girl, and Bones glared his triumph.

"That is what the wicked old ship-sailer said. Showed me the money,
an' I sent him straight off on the job. He said he'd got a Stock
Exchange person named Morris----"

"Morris!" gasped the girl. "That is my step-father!"

Bones jumped up, a man inspired.

"The naughty old One, who married your sainted mother?" he gurgled.
"My miss! My young an' jolly old Marguerite!"

He sat down at his desk, yanked open the drawer, and slapped down his
cheque-book.

"Three thousand pounds," he babbled, writing rapidly. "You'd better
keep it for her, dear old friend of Faust."

"But I don't understand," she said, bewildered.

"Telegram," said Bones briefly. "Read it."

She picked up the buff form and read. It was postmarked from Cowes,
and ran:

"In accordance your telegraphed instructions, have sold your
schooner-yacht to Mr. Dibbs, who paid cash. Did not give name of
owner. Dibbs did not ask to see boat. All he wanted was receipt for
money."

"They are calling this afternoon for my fifteen thousand," said Bones,
cackling light-headedly. "Ring up jolly old Scotland Yard, and ask 'em
to send me all the police they've got in stock!"

CHAPTER III

BONES AND THE WHARFINGERS

I

The kite wheeling invisible in the blue heavens, the vulture appearing
mysteriously from nowhere in the track of the staggering buck, possess
qualities which are shared by certain favoured human beings. No
newspaper announced the fact that there had arrived in the City of
London a young man tremendously wealthy and as tremendously
inexperienced.

There were no meetings of organized robber gangs, where masked men laid
nefarious plans and plots, but the instinct which called the kite to
his quarry and the carrion to the kill brought many strangers--who were
equally strange to Bones and to one another--to the beautiful office
which he had fitted for himself for the better furtherance of h