“Then you may as well understand another thing, while you are about it,” continued the latter, “and that is, that from this time out you are to attend to your own affairs and let me entirely alone. What I do with my money is none of your business.” “I generally do attend to my own affairs,” replied Sam, “and I shall attend to yours in a way you don’t think of. You haven’t started for Texas, yet!” Gus jumped as if he had been shot. He could hardly bring himself to believe that he had heard aright. He had guarded his secret as closely as a boy could. Having no intimate friend to assist him in keeping it, he had not lisped a word of it to anybody; but it had leaked out after all, and Sam seemed to know all about it. “Tex——” said Gus, drawing a long breath and leaning heavily on the counter, “as!” “Yes! You have laid your plans to skip out and leave us all in the lurch, but you shan’t do it! I must have what you owe me first; and when you get the money on that check, I will tell you how much I want of it to pay me for the trouble of keeping your secret. I know you didn’t get the money to-day.” “How do you know that?” stammered Gus, growing more and more astonished and bewildered. “That’s my business!” was the satisfactory reply. Just then a customer came in and moved up to Sam’s side of the store, and this gave Gus an opportunity to collect his scattered wits, and think over what Sam had just told him. How in the world had the latter learned his secret? was a question that Gus asked himself over and over again, but without finding any satisfactory answer. It was too deep a mystery for him to solve just then, for he was so utterly confounded that he could not think at all. “You haven’t started for Texas yet,” and “when you get the money on that check, I will tell you how much I want of it to pay me for the trouble of keeping your secret,” were the words that were constantly passing through the boy’s mind, and he could not drive them out long enough to decide what he ought to do. If he had any means of finding out just how much Sam knew, he might be able to make up his mind to something. “But I don’t see how I am to find that out,” thought Gus, walking nervously up and down the store, “for of course he won’t tell me, if I ask him. The whole thing bangs me completely. I know I haven’t said a word that would lead him or anybody else to suspect anything; but he has got hold of it somehow, and wants a part of my hundred dollars to pay him for keeping his mouth shut. He shan’t have it! No matter what happens, he shan’t have it, for I don’t know how much I shall need to pay my expenses.”