“Popper ain’t the man he was. He ain’t nothing but a deuce in this game. He ain’t going to make anything out of it at all. Do you know who is?” “Them revolutionists, I guess--what ain’t grafted on the way.” “Well! I’m not in this to help any old revolution. I tell you right now, Mr. Wilkins, that it’s me for the gold if I can get it to Noo York.” “Ain’t you afraid of them bombovitches?” demanded the man. “Me! Not in Noo York, I ain’t. In Russia, I ain’t saying.” A delighted grin came over Wilkins’s face. “Say!” he exclaimed. “You’re all rightski. They tried to scare me with them fellows, and I let ’em think they had, but, Lord sakes, they ain’t troubling me none. If they come to Colorado after me, the Czar’ll have one less to put in his dungeonoffski.” “Then”--the girl held out her hand--“it’s understood. We’ll stand together. If we get a chance to skiddoo with the gold, we’ll do it. An’ I’ll marry you the day we get it to Noo York.” CHAPTER THIRTEEN Black and high, the islands of the Aland Archipelago rise out of the Baltic. All winter long they lie bound about with ice. With the spring, the ice, borne southward by the waking streams of the north, grinds past them, scraping and tearing, rending all that lies in its path. The short summer follows, when the great bowl of the Baltic rocks to the horizon like molten gold; when the black rocks take on a coat of living green; and the sea birds scream as they flash through the surf that breaks against them or tears through the narrow channels between. On the eastern edge of the archipelago rise two islands, Burndo and Ivono, Siamese twins whose tie has not been wholly severed. The channel between them lies almost east and west and not north and south, and so has been spared the full scour of the annual ice-flood. Cut deep at each seaward end, in the middle it is interrupted by a dike of harder rock that as yet persists against the inevitable and at low tide changes it into two inlets that nearly touch each other. Into the western inlet, driven by her slowing engines, and urged by waves and tide, the _Orkney_ had sped two years before; had impaled herself upon a sunken rock; and, shuddering backward, had sunk with her crew and her passengers and her million pounds sterling of gold.