I have to offer you."

"Look here, Leon," Curtis interrupted; "what's the good of behaving
like this? We are all in the same boat--starving--desperate. So let us
lay our heads together and see if we can't think of something--some
way out of it."

"A Burglary Company Limited, for instance!" Hamar sneered. "No! I'm
not having any. I've neither tools nor experience. The San Francisco
police handle one roughly, so I'm told, and hard labour isn't to my
liking."

"There are other things besides burglary!" Curtis said in tones of
annoyance. "We might work a fake."

"If I work anything of that sort," Hamar said hastily, "I work alone.
Think of something else."

"I tell you Matt and I are pretty well desperate," Curtis cried, "and
if we don't think of something soon, we shan't be able to think at
all. We've tried our level best to get work--we've answered every
likely and unlikely advertisement in the papers--and all to no
purpose. So if Providence won't help us we must help ourselves.
Robbery, burglary, fakes, anything short of murder--it's all the same
to us now--we're tired of starving--dead sick of it. We would do
anything, sell our very souls for a meal. My God! I never imagined how
terrible it is to feel so hungry. You appear to be interested, Matt.
What is it?"

"Why, look here, you fellows!" Kelson said slowly. "This book is all
about a place called Atlantis that is said to have existed in the
Atlantic Ocean between America and Ireland, and to have been deluged
by an earthquake owing to the wickedness of its inhabitants. They
practised sorcery."

"Practised foolery," Hamar said. "It's tosh--all tosh! Wickedness is
only a matter of climate--and there's no such thing as sorcery."

"So I thought," Kelson replied; "but I'm not so sure now. The author
of this book writes darned sensibly, and is apparently at no loss for
corroborative testimony. He was a professor too. See! Thomas Henry
Maitland, at one time Professor of English at the University of Basle
in Switzerland. There's an asterisk against his name and a footnote in
very old-fashioned handwriting--the 's's' are all 'f's,' and half the
letters capitals. Listen--

"'Thomas Maitland, despite the remonstrances of his friends,
visited Spain. By order of the Holy Inquisition he was arrested,
May 5, 1693, on a charge of practising sorcery, and burned alive
at the Auto da Fe, in the Grand Market Square, Madrid; having in
the interim been subj