man to let go, and it seems as treasurer he was trusted
implicitly. He was said to have more clothes than any man in Boston.

I am used to thinking quickly, and by the time I had read this I had an
idea.

"What in hell do you make of that, Crocker?" cried my client, eyeing me
closely and repeating the question again and again, as was his wont
when agitated.

"It is certainly plain enough," I replied, "but I should like to talk to
you before you decide to hand him over to the authorities."

I thought I knew Mr. Cooke, and I was not mistaken.

"Authorities!" he roared. "Damn the authorities! There's my yacht, and
there's the Canadian border." And he pointed to the north.

The others were pressing around us by this time, and had caught the
significant words which Mr. Cooke had uttered. I imagine that if my
client had stopped to think twice, which of course is a preposterous
condition, he would have confided his discovery only to Farrar and to me.
It was now out of the question to keep it from the rest of the party, and
Mr. Trevor got the headlines over my shoulder. I handed him the sheet.

"Read it, Mr. Trevor," said Mrs. Cooke.

Mr. Trevor, in a somewhat unsteady voice, read the headlines and began
the column, and they followed breathless with astonishment and agitation.
Once or twice the senator paused to frown upon the Celebrity with a
terrible sternness, thus directing all other eyes to him. His demeanor
was a study in itself. It may be surmised, from what I have said of him,
that there was a strain of the actor in his composition; and I am
prepared to make an affidavit that, secure in the knowledge that he had
witnesses present to attest his identity, he hugely enjoyed the sensation
he was creating. That he looked forward with a profound pleasure to the
stir which the disclosure that he was the author of The Sybarites would
make. His face wore a beatific smile.

As Mr. Trevor continued, his voice became firmer and his manner more
majestic. It was a task distinctly to his taste, and one might have
thought he was reading the sentence of a Hastings. I was standing next
to his daughter. The look of astonishment, perhaps of horror, which I
had seen on her face when her father first began to read had now faded
into something akin to wickedness. Did she wink? I can't say, never
before having had a young woman wink at me. But the next moment her
vinaigrette was rolling down the bank towards the brook, and I was after