val. Have I your promise to comply with my wishes on this
point, and on any other which may arise in connection with the capture?"

And a steely glitter shot through the beetling eyebrows; but Hardcastle
had given his word before the request was rounded to that pedantic
neatness which characterized the crabbed utterances of the
round-shouldered dictator.

"That is well," he went on, "for now I can admit you both into my plan
of campaign. Suppose we sit down here on the veranda, at the end
farthest from any door. Be good enough to draw your chairs nearer mine,
gentlemen. It might be dangerous if a fourth person heard me say that I
had discovered the murderer's ill-gotten hoard!"

"Not you, sir!" cried Cameron.

"Good God!" exclaimed the squatter.

"The discoverer was not divine, and indeed no human being but myself,"
the bent man averred, turning with mischievous humor from one to the
other of his astonished hearers. "Yes, there was more gold than I would
have credited a sane Scotchman with carrying through the wilds; but the
bulk was in small notes and the whole has been buried in the scrub close
to the scene of the murder, doubtless to avoid at once the detection and
the division of such unusual spoil."

"You are thinking of his mate?"

It was Cameron who had asked the question, but Mr. Hardcastle followed
immediately with another.

"Did you remove the spoil?"

"My dear Mr. Hardcastle! How you must lack the detective instinct! Of
course, I left everything as nearly as possible as I found it; the man
camps on the spot, or very near it; he lights no fires and is careful to
leave no marks, but I am more or less convinced of it. And that is where
I shall take him to-night, or, rather, early to-morrow morning."

"I wish you could make it to-night," said Hardcastle, with a yawn that
put a period to a pause of some duration.

"Why?" demanded the detective, raising open eyes for once.

"Because I've had a desperate week of it," replied Hardcastle, "and am
dead with sleep."

The other carried his growing geniality to the length of an almost
hearty laugh.

"My dear sir, do you suppose that I thought of taking _you_ with us? No,
Mr. Hardcastle, the risks of this sort of enterprise are for those who
are paid to run them. And there is a risk; if we timed our attack too
early or too late there would be bloodshed to a certainty. But at two
o'clock the average man is fast asleep; at a quarter after one,
therefore, I