almost the first question that he was asked was whether the deputy sheriffs had succeeded in learning who had “collared Shaughnessy’s package.”

“They have,” he replied, an answer which caused all three of his male auditors to pause and look at him.

“And who was it, Tim?” David urged when the visitor showed signs of preferring food to recountal.

“Why, it was a chap named Ray. Tom Ray, I think his whole name is. Sort of a tenderfoot, so the boys say, although I don’t know him pussonally. Comes from back in Iowa, or some of the corn States, and the pore durned fool must have got sort of discouraged because he hadn’t found no pay streak up on Torren’s Gulch where he had a claim, and is so hard up he has to beg for credit to get even some beans and sow belly and—well—does a fool thing! Goes and sticks up the stage and—What do you think! You’d never guess how they came to nail him! No siree! Not in a hundred years! That’s what they calls the mysterious circumstances!”

“Sheriff gets one of these anonymous letters that says the writer’s a woman and that this gink Ray done her dirt, so she’s goin’ to squall. Says he robbed the stage and that he’s got the money hid somewhere, most likely under a loose board under the bunk in his cabin where he’s keepin’ it till it’s safe to spend some of it. Well, the sheriff himself comes up, so the boys says, and goes out to this tenderfoot’s cabin, and Ray pretended he didn’t have nothin’ to hide, wouldn’t think of robbin’ anything or anybody, and swears he never done no woman any wrong because he’d never had nothin’ to do with a woman since he came to Californy, and that as far as he knows there’s never been a member of the female sex in his cabin since he built it. They say he put up grand indignation talk—probably tryin’ to bluff it out, you see. But it didn’t go. Not at all! Sheriff and his men goes in, pulls out the bunk, finds the board and there, in a nice tin cracker box, is Shaughnessy’s money all done up in the package the way it was shipped. Ray hadn’t even busted the seals. When it’s shown to Shaughnessy he proves it’s his because he’d taken down the numbers on the bills, which were new ones he’d got from somewhere.”

“What? What’s that? New bills, you say?” David exclaimed. “Then he must have got ’em from some bank, and the only bank in Wallula is one he’s not friendly with, because we all know he had a row with the manager when it opened because said manager wouldn’t play in on the Shaughnessy game. Besides, since when does any one suppose Tom Shaughnessy’s a careful enough 

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