“I wonder if I got enough! There’s no telling what the stuff is really worth. I’d have given it to him for a million, all of it, if he hadn’t taken me for a common sneak thief. Well, I guess I touched his limit. If he lays down on my proposition, I’ll have to look up the other crowd, and I suspect there isn’t much to choose between them so far as their methods are concerned. But I bet old Schnei will turn up in Paris before the week is out with a bag of dollars. And there are the bonds—they may be worth something, after all, to Melody!” He interrupted his meditation to squint an eye at a palace toward which the _cocher_ was furiously waving his whip. “All right, _cocher_,—you can drive on,” he replied, having taken in the monument sufficiently. “Well”—he concluded his meditation aloud—“two millions, cash, is a pretty good bunch of money for any girl. I don’t believe she could have done any better herself. And there are the eight millions of bonds. Now where in thunder _is_ Melody?” “_Was_?” the coachman demanded. Brainard waved him on, and continued his thoughts without speaking. “There is the mine, too—the Melody mine. Queer name for a mine, and a queer name for a woman, too, now you think of it! Is there any Melody girl—woman, anyway, anywhere?” The mere doubt of the existence of such a personage dampened his good spirits. If Melody was a fiction of his youthful imagination, he was loath to part with her; for she had become the possible reality that held his dream together. “No!” he concluded aloud. “No man would have made all that effort, when he was dying, to speak the name of a mine!” With this sage reflection he dismissed from his thoughts the teasing puzzle of Krutzmacht and his heirs, and devoted his entire attention to the monuments of The Hague. XIX Five days later Brainard stood chatting with Herr Adolf Schneider and Herr Nathan Schneider on the broad granite steps of the Crédit Lyonnais in Paris. The transfer of all Krutzmacht’s papers, except the packages of bonds, had just been completed within the bank, and receipts for them had been given to the young American, together with drafts on New York for two millions of dollars. “May I inquire what you intend to do now?” Herr Nathan asked, simple curiosity on his broad face. “I’m going to put in one week more here, then pull out for San Francisco, and try to hunt up my principal,” Brainard replied. “You are not afraid to return to the States?” Herr Adolf inquired. “Why should I be? Our people know when they are licked. Those crooks won’t worry me any longer. More likely they’ll be after you now!” Brainard laughed pleasantly. “I think,” Herr Nathan observed complacently, “we can take care of them.” “I hope so! I want to see those bonds make good some day.” “Don’t be in a hurry to sell your bonds, young man. That is my best advice,” the banker said gravely.