A red leather-bound note book contained a record of receipts and expenditures, but the record could not be made, by any arithmetical process of which Paul was master, to square with the papers in the trunk. Certain things appeared to be clear, however. There was a mortgage on the ranch for fifteen thousand dollars, of the proceeds of which ten thousand had been paid to the bank in Vancouver. To this entry was attached the note, “This squares the bank, and Sleeman too, outside of the mortgage, thank Heaven! Would to God I could square other accounts as well. Those, alas! I must commit to the mercy of Almighty God and to the love of those I love dearer than life itself.” Long Paul pondered this note, but without clear understanding. A list of entries of sums of money, following the mysterious letters, “I.O.U.,” with dates and Gaspard’s signature, was found on one page and on the opposite page a list of sales of Holsteins and Percherons, but the sums did not correspond, nor did the entries marked I.O.U. correspond to a neatly labelled bundle of slips of paper, duly dated and signed, similarly marked with the letters I.O.U. and figures representing certain sums of money. Finally Paul threw up the struggle and resolved that he would get the truth from Sleeman himself. He had little knowledge and less experience of business matters, but he had an instinctive knowledge of men. Indeed he knew himself to be possessed of a strange power of reading the hearts of men. No man had ever been able to lie successfully to him. Filled as he was with a settled and deadly rage toward Sleeman, he knew that though he could kill him with his bare hands and though some such vengeance was the man’s due for the killing of his father, yet from such an act of vengeance he was prevented by the conscience within him and by his solemn word to both his father and his Indian stepmother. No, he must not and would not execute vengeance upon his enemy. Upon that he was resolved. But he was equally resolved that he would find a method by which he would extract the truth from Sleeman’s soul. With this resolve arrived at, he fell into sleep as the dawn was breaking, from which he was roused by Indian Tom only when the forenoon was half gone.