"You will bear me out, Mr. Cludde, when I remind you that the owner of the estate had fled from her lawfully-appointed guardian, aided and abetted in her flight, I doubt not, by this upstart himself. I am ready to account for my administration of the property to Sir Richard Cludde, and to no one else, and I say you have no right to call in question anything I may have done in his name." The fellow's impudence fairly took my breath away. For some moments I could do nothing but look at him, and he returned my gaze without blinking, the old sneer playing about his lips. The brazen coolness with which he ignored his recent attack on the house and sought to put me in the wrong filled me with sheer amazement. I began to wonder again whether, after all, the tale he had told to the buccaneers was a lie, and he had come back to the house with no further design than to wreak his spite upon it. And yet this could hardly be, for he could easily have set fire to it, and then the question flashed upon my mind suddenly, why had he pressed home the attack on this particular room, when all the rest of the house lay open to him? Did not that point to the probability that the money he had spoken of was actually here, in this room? 'Twas vain to bandy more words with the fellow. I called in Joe Punchard and one of my seamen, and bade them take him to the kitchen and tie him up. He flushed and bit his lip when I gave this order, but he saw 'twas folly to resist. When he had gone I told the others what I had been thinking, and suggested that we should search the room. A bureau stood against the wall; this was the only article of furniture in which money could be secured, and Mr. McTavish, who used it constantly, assured me that there was but a small sum in one of its drawers, which he had himself placed there. We looked around in perplexity. The walls were of wood, not of lath and plaster, so that there were no nooks and crannies in which he could have bestowed his hoard. The floor also was of single planking, forming the roof of the room below. There seemed no possible place of concealment here. Could there be any spot on the veranda that might have served his purpose? I went out; the veranda was empty, the men who had been injured (and some who were dead) having been removed. If my reasoning was correct, the hiding place must be on the inner side, otherwise the assailants could have obtained what they came to seek without attacking the room. We looked carefully along the base of the wall where it met the floor of the veranda at first in vain.