"Live, certainly," laughed Smith, "but not on the proceeds of this coup-de-main. Non pas! I am going to return this packet to its rightful owner, the Grand Duchess Theodorica of Esthonia. And what do you think of that, Quintana?" Quintana smiled. "You do not believe me?" inquired Smith. Quintana smiled again. "Allons, bon!" exclaimed Smith, rising. "It's the unusual that happens in life, my dear Quintana. And now we'll take a little inventory of these marvellous gems before we part.... Sit very, very still, Quintana,--unless you want to lie stiller still.... I'll let you take a modest peep at the Flaming Jewel----" busily unwrapping the packet--"just one little peep, Quintana----" He unwrapped the paper. Two cakes of sugar-milk chocolate lay within. Quintana turned white, then deeply, heavily red. Then he smiled in ghastly fashion: "Yes," he said hoarsely, "as you have just said, sir, it is usually the unusual which happens in the world." EPISODE SIX THE JEWEL AFLAME I Mike Clinch and his men "drove" Star Peak, and drew a blanket covert. There was a new shanty atop, camp debris, plenty of signs of recent occupation everywhere,--hot embers in which offal still smouldered, bottles odorous of claret dregs, and an aluminum culinary outfit, unwashed, as though Quintana and his men had departed in haste. Far in the still valley below, Mike Clinch squatted beside the runway he had chosen, a cocked rifle across his knees. The glare in his small, pale eyes waned and flared as distant sounds broke the forest silence, grew vague, died out,--the fairy clatter of a falling leaf, the sudden scurry of a squirrel, a feathery rustle of swift wings in play or combat, the soft crash of a rotten bough sagging earthward to enrich the soil that grew it. And, as Clinch squatted there, murderously intent, ever the fixed obsession burned in his fever brain, stirring his thin lips to incessant muttering,--a sort of soundless invocation, part chronicle, part prayer: "O God A'mighty, in your big, swell mansion up there, all has went contrary with me sence you let that there damn millionaire, Harrod, come into this here forest.... He went and built unto hisself an habitation, and he put up a wall of law all around me where I was earnin' a lawful livin' in Thy nice, clean wilderness.... And now comes this here Quintana and robs my girlie.... I promised her mother I'd make a lady of her little Eve.... I loved my wife, O Lord.... Once she showed me a piece in the Bible,--I ain't never found it sence,--but it said: 'And the woman she fled into the wilderness where there was a place prepared for her of God.' ... That's what _you_ wrote into your own Bible, O God! You can't go back on it. I seen it.