late you!" I found Edgar
extending toward me a two-dollar bill. "You gave the chauffeur two
dollars,"' he said. "The fare was really one dollar eighty; so you owe
me twenty cents."

Mechanically I laid two dimes upon the table.

"All the other expenses," continued Edgar, "which I agreed to pay,
I have paid." He made a peremptory gesture. "I won't detain you any
longer," he said. "Good-night!"

"Good-night!" I cried. "Don't I see the treasure?" Against the walls of
chilled steel my voice rose like that of a tortured soul. "Don't I touch
it!" I yelled. "Don't I even get a squint?"

Even the watchmen looked sorry for me.

"You do not!" said Edgar calmly. "You have fulfilled your part of the
agreement. I have fulfilled mine. A year from now you can write the
story." As I moved in a dazed state toward the steel door, his voice
halted me.

"And you can say in your story," called Edgar, "that there is only one
way to get a buried treasure. That is to go, and get it!"

THE CONSUL

For over forty years, in one part of the world or another, old man
Marshall had, served his country as a United States consul. He had
been appointed by Lincoln. For a quarter of a century that fact was his
distinction. It was now his epitaph. But in former years, as each new
administration succeeded the old, it had again and again saved his
official head. When victorious and voracious place-hunters, searching
the map of the world for spoils, dug out his hiding-place and demanded
his consular sign as a reward for a younger and more aggressive party
worker, the ghost of the dead President protected him. In the State
Department, Marshall had become a tradition. "You can't touch Him!"
the State Department would say; "why, HE was appointed by Lincoln!"
Secretly, for this weapon against the hungry headhunters, the department
was infinitely grateful. Old man Marshall was a consul after its own
heart. Like a soldier, he was obedient, disciplined; wherever he was
sent, there, without question, he would go. Never against exile, against
ill-health, against climate did he make complaint. Nor when he was moved
on and down to make way for some ne'er-do-well with influence, with a
brother-in-law in the Senate, with a cousin owning a newspaper, with
rich relatives who desired him to drink himself to death at the expense
of the government rather than at their own, did old man Marshall point
to his record as a claim for more just treatment.

And it had been