out it."

Phil stood helpless.

"Heavens!" continued Jim, "five years in jail for that pig! And you
never split on him. The dirty sewer-rat!

"I remember every point of that case now. Being a lawyer, I
followed it closely. It struck me as one of purely damned, damning
circumstantial evidence and it interested me at the time."

"And--and you found this in--in my old boot?" asked Phil, pulling
himself up.

"Ay!--and pretty nearly didn't pay any heed to it. I unrolled it
without thinking, then the queer mix-up of letters and numbers got me.
I wasn't so very busy--I never am when something crops up that
attracts the curiosity part of me. I wondered what it could all mean.
I sat down there and got it in two hours, beginning at the end and
working backwards. I should have stopped, laddie, when I got a certain
length, but it dealt with you and I didn't think I would be right in
stopping.

"Edgar Allen Poe's 'Gold Bug' gave me the incentive for deciphering
such like conundrums. I found it easy enough starting in with his
method of deduction.

"You're no' angry wi' me, Phil?" asked Jim, taking refuge in his
favourite Doric.

"No--no--I'm not, Jim! I meant to--to tell you--someday. I--this has
caught me unexpectedly and I can't just think right. But I thought
this had been burned long ago. Brenchfield thinks so too. The police
had these boots all the time I was in jail, and they didn't discover
it.

"Let's sit down, Jim! I've got to tell you all about it now. Supper
can wait. We'll both feel the better for it afterwards."

They sat down together on the bed in that little back room.

"It's a common enough story, Jim. I was born in Toronto. There were
four of us, my dad, my mother, my little sister Margery and myself. A
happier quartette no one ever heard of. But my mother died suddenly.
To my mind, she took all the fun of life with her. Dad moved us to
Texas, where he became engaged in some mining or oil projects. A year
after my mother's death, he married again. I did not understand a
thing about it, until he told me I had a new mother. In a fit of
boyish resentment, I packed my clothes together, took my small hoard
of savings, went into my little sister's bedroom one night as she lay
asleep, kissed her, cried over her, and ran away.

"Silly, Jim,--wasn't it? But from that day to this I have not seen a
relative of mine.

"I worked my way north, back into Canada, to Campbeltown, where I
remembered having visited