police would hear something from the other side, and meanwhile I must possess my soul in patience.

This was a thing easier said than done, especially as, when aimlessly glancing at a weekly paper in the club next day, I came across a paragraph which gushed in the conventionally nauseous manner over the forthcoming marriage of the beautiful young heiress, Miss Karine Cunningham, and Mr. Carson Wildred, the "well-known millionaire and popular man of Society."

Days never dragged as they did with me until I received the promised intimation from my friend the inspector that tidings had arrived from the police in New York. It was 168 all right, so far as my friend was concerned, and I need have no further fears regarding his safety. The body found in the Thames was certainly not that of Mr. Harvey Farnham, as he was in New York, and had actually been interviewed there. He had been very ill in crossing, and had had the misfortune to fall down the companionway on shipboard, in a heavy gale, spraining his ankle. He would not be able to resume his journey and proceed to Denver for some time to come, but had laughed at the idea of any foul play. When questioned on the subject of the ring, he said that he had given it to his friend, Mr. Wildred, at parting, and jokingly added that he had experienced great difficulty in getting it off.

168

In these circumstances, as there could be no further doubt of Mr. Farnham's living presence in New York, no possible shadow of suspicion need any longer rest upon Mr. Carson Wildred, who had throughout done all in his power to further the investigations. The search for the man from the camp near the 169 backwater would therefore be carried on upon the same lines as before.

169

A hot sense of injustice burned within me. I had been thwarted on every side, not, I believed, by the revelation of truth, but by Carson Wildred's superior cunning. He had boasted to me that, in the rôle of villain, he would have been more successful than I; and I was quite ready to agree with this statement. All things seemed against me, and yet something which I took to be instinct cried aloud that my dream had not deceived. I could not understand how it was that the New York police had been made to believe in the identity of a man falsely representing himself to be Harvey Farnham, yet I was convinced that in some devilish way even they had been cozened. No other man living, perhaps, could have undertaken so huge a scheme, with so many different strings to pull at 

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