as
leading was not the noblest; he had no illusions on that score; but he
was no longer a loafer waiting in luxurious ease for the curtain to fall
upon a dull first act in a tedious drama, but a man of action, quite
capable of holding his own against the world!

"You've caught the spirit at last! We're the jolliest beggars alive!"
exulted the Governor.

He dropped from the clouds at intervals; proved his possession of a
practical mind; received telegrams in towns Archie had never heard of
before, and tossed the fragments to the winds.

"All the machinery, the intricate mechanism of the underworld is at work
to assist us! I tell you as little as possible, but I neglect nothing.
All communications in cipher, and you can see that the telegraph clerks
think we are persons of highest importance."

He dashed off replies unhesitatingly, emphasizing the urgency for their
prompt despatch. Skirting the shores of Erie, he produced from a hollow
tree a bundle of mail, wrapped in oil-skin. Soiled envelopes with the
addresses scrawled awkwardly in pencil were reenclosed in brown
envelopes neatly directed in typewriting and bearing the S. S. S. P. in
one corner. The humor of his Society for the Segregation of Stolen
Property tickled the Governor mightily and when Archie asked what would
happen if these packets of mail went astray and fell into the hands of
post-office inspectors, he displayed one of the notes which consisted of
a dozen unrelated words, decorated with clumsy drawings,--a tree, a
bridge, a barred window.

"Only twenty men out of our hundred million could read that! Code of our
most exclusive circle. The silly wretch has been raiding country banks
in the middle west and carried his playfulness too far. He's in jail now
but not at all worried--merely bored. He'd safely planted his stuff
before they nabbed him, and he had fixed up his alibi in advance;
that's the import of that oblong in the corner, which means that he can
show a white card--a clean bill of health, legally speaking, and isn't
afraid."

"I suppose he expects you to find the stuff and turn it into non-taxable
securities," Archie remarked ironically.

"Precisely the idea! But I may not be able to serve him there. It will
grieve me to leave the boys in the lurch; they've confided in me a long
time."

The Governor had lapsed into moods of silence frequently since they left
Rochester. The imminence of his release from whatever power had
dominated him