neighbour's store by running a little adit from the worthless shaft
into the rich one. It was not an unheard-of thing for the value of such
properties to fluctuate. A rich mine would pay out, and a poor one at
a distance would become suddenly enriched; and these changes were,
no doubt rightly, in the common instance attributed to the capricious
operations of Nature. If the owner of the tapped sources of the cousins'
wealth suspected anything to begin with nobody ever knew. The only fact
with which we need concern ourselves is that the fraud went on without
exposure for many years, and that James and John alike grew fat on it.

A certain hulking ruffian, with an Australian digger's beard, had turned
up of late to disturb the tranquillity of the partners. He had been
asking what they regarded as an exorbitant price for his silence in
respect to the construction of that adit which has just been mentioned,
and had been fobbed off from time to time with five or ten pounds, as
the case might be, and with promises of more. Young Polson Jervase had
caught this person slinking about the house on the Beacon Hill in what
looked to him like a suspicious fashion, and an interview between the
two had resulted in a stand-up fight in which the blackmailer had got
very much the worst of it. But as he rose from the last round, and
spat out the fragments of one or two broken teeth, he said things which
filled the honourable and manly spirit of young Jervase with a terror to
which he hardly dared to give a name. The terror would have named
itself loudly enough if he had dared but to let it; but next to being an
honourable man himself, the young fellow wanted to believe that he came
of honest people, and the rascal's threats and innuendoes had left him
with a dreadful doubt upon his mind.

The combat had taken place at the very gate of the grey-stone house, and
the old lady in the black satin and the costly yellow lace had flown out
at the finish of it in time to hear the threats and innuendoes which
had brought such trouble to her boy. It was a hundred to one that young
Polson Jervase would have been less disturbed if his mother, hearing
these things, had not fallen to trembling and weeping and wringing
her hands; for he argued, naturally, that she would not have been so
dreadfully upset if she had not feared at least that there was some
ground for the words which had been spoken in her hearing.

General Boswell had his concern in the ma