was inclined to be indignant.

"Of course I haven't," he declared. "You asked us all to keep
quiet about it and not to tell a soul, and I supposed you meant
just that."

"Eh? So I did, Charlie, so I did. Beg your pardon, boy. I might
have known you'd keep your hatches closed. Well, here's the yarn,
Mrs. Armstrong. It don't make me out any too everlastin'
brilliant. A grown man that would shove that amount of money into
his overcoat pocket and then go sasshayin' from Wapatomac to Orham
ain't the kind I'd recommend to ship as cow steward on a cattle
boat, to say nothin' of president of a bank. But confessin's good
for the soul, they say, even if it does make a feller feel like a
fool, so here goes. I did just that thing."

He went on to tell of his trip to Wapatomac, his interview with
Sage, his visit to the windmill shop, his discovery that four
hundred of the fourteen hundred had disappeared. Then he told of
his attempts to trace it, of Jed's anxious inquiries from day to
day, and, finally, of the scene he had just passed through.

"So there you are," he concluded. "I wish to mercy you'd tell me
what it all means, for I can't tell myself. If it hadn't been so--
so sort of pitiful, and if I hadn't been so puzzled to know what
made him do it, I cal'late I'd have laughed myself sick to see poor
old Jed tryin' to lie. Why, he ain't got the first notion of how
to begin; I don't cal'late he ever told a real, up-and-down lie
afore in his life. That was funny enough--but when he began to
tell me he was a thief! Gracious king! And all he could think of
in the way of an excuse was that he stole the four hundred to buy a
suit of clothes with. Ho, ho, ho!"

He roared again. Charlie Phillips laughed also. But his sister
did not laugh. She had seated herself in the rocker by the window
when the captain began his tale and now she had drawn back into the
corner where the shadows were deepest.

"So there you are," said Captain Sam, again. "There's the riddle.
Now what's the answer? Why did he do it? Can either of you guess?"

Phillips shook his head. "You have got me," he declared. "And the
money he gave you was not the money you lost? You're sure of that?"

"Course I'm sure of it. In the first place I lost a packet of
clean tens and twenties; this stuff I've got in my pocket now is
all sorts, ones and twos and fives and everything. And in the
second place--"

"Pardon me, just a minute, Captain H