hen at Mike and me, with a puzzled expression
which seemed to ask: Is this a crazy freak, or an absurd, insulting
joke?

"Now," said the object of this scrutiny, turning to me, "I have a
talisman for you also, wherewith to entice the Sultan's daughter.
It is a ruby of rare size and color, and therefore valuable. But
the power of the spell it is said to possess remains to be tested.
I give it to you because in you, at this moment, are fulfilled
the conditions necessary to exercise this spell; which you do by
simply taking the jewel in your hand thus, and saying,--

Come, O royal maiden, come to me this hour."

"And she'll come, of course," said Mike, bantering me in his turn.
"Now hoist your signal and hail the daughter of the Grand Turk,
and let Fred pipe for his princess at the same auspicious moment."

"Amen!" I said, holding up the gem till the moonbeams blushed red
in it, and calling out with a strange, impulsive sense of power,--

"Come, O royal maiden, come to me this hour."

But no responsive tooting of the whistle echoed from the lips of
Fred. I looked toward him for an explanation of the silence, and
beheld him spitting out the fragments of the instrument, which
had gone to pieces in his mouth.

"What's all this?" he exclaimed, unrolling a little scroll of paper
that had been compressed within it, and holding it up to the light.
"See here, Joe, what do you make of this?"

"A draft for ten thousand pounds sterling, on the Bank of England,
duly signed and indorsed," I answered after scrutinizing it carefully.

We turned simultaneously for an explanation, but there was no one
to give it.

"I always suspected who _he_ was," said Mike, "but he's got no
hold on me,--no claim to a bond signed with _my_ blood. See, there
he goes!"

I looked, and saw a boat shooting across the stream with a swiftness
that argued some optical delusion. That unmistakable figure stood in
the stern, urging it with a single scull, and as it disappeared in
the confusion of boats and the darkness, a superstitious suspicion
crept over me that he might be the person Mike suggested. Soon the
captain came on board, and on learning the absence of the boat
and its occupant, he expressed considerable anxiety and impatience.
A breeze sprang up and began to curl the surface of the water,
and clouds obscured the moon. Then the wind freshened to a storm,
and lifted the waves on the channel, and roared in the cypress
forests above Per