The man with the illegible signature wrote from Nevada. He had seen, during a visit to Kansas City, the circulars of the Carbonado Mining Company. After his return, he had passed through Carbonado. "I wondered, when I saw your literature, whether there had been a new strike in that busted camp," he wrote. "There hadn't. Carbonado now consists of one store-keeper and a few retired prospectors who are trying to scrape something from the corners of the old Buffalo Boy property. That camp was worked out in the eighties--and it was never much but promises at that." As for the photographs which decorated the Carbonado Company's circulars, this man recognized at least one of them as a picture of a property he knew in Utah. Finally, he asked sarcastically just how long they expected to keep up the graft. "It's the old game, isn't it?" he inquired, "pay three per cent for a while and then get out with the capital." Three per cent a month--that _was_ exactly what the Carbonado Company was paying. She wondered-- Conjecture for Susannah would have been certainty could she have heard the conversation just the other side of that closed door. At the moment when the contents of this letter flashed back into her mind, the letter itself lay on Mr. Byan's polished mahogany table. Beside it lay a pile of penciled memoranda through which fluttered from time to time the nervous hand of H. Withington Warner. Susannah would scarcely have known her genial employer. The mask of actor and clergyman had slipped from his face. His cheeks seemed to fall flat and flabby. His eyes had lost their benevolence. His mouth was set as hard as a trap, the corners drooping. Across the table from him, too, sat a transformed Byan. His smooth, regular features had sharpened to the likeness of a rat's. His voice, however, was still velvety; even though it had just flung at Warner a string of oaths. "I told you we ought to've let go and skipped six weeks ago," he said, "that was the time for the touch-off. Secret Service still chasin' Heinies--everythin' coming in and nothin' going out. The suckers had already stopped biting and then you go and hand out two more monthly dividends and settle all the bills like you intended to stay in business forever. What did we want with this royal suite here, and ours a correspondence game? What do we split if we stop today? Twelve hundred dollars. Twelve hundred dollars! We land this Cowler--see!" Warner, unperturbed, swept his glance to O'Hearn, who sat huddled up in his chair, searching with his glance now one of his partners, now the other. "Mike," he said, "you're certain about your tip on the fly cops?"