"What a simpleton you are!" she told him. "Don't you see he's merely paying his debt?" "I wonder--" Dan eyed her in amazement. "Gee! If that's so he is a prince, isn't he?" The same ship which had brought the ominous news to O'Neil also brought Curtis Gordon north. He had remained in Seattle only long enough to see the Illis story in print, and then had hastened back to the front. But his satisfaction over the mischief he had done received a rude jolt when at his first moment of leisure he looked over the late magazines which he had bought before taking leave. In one which had appeared on the news-stands that very day he found, to his amazement, an article by Miss Eliza Appleton, in which his own picture appeared. He pounced upon it eagerly; and then, as he read, his eyes narrowed and his jaw stiffened. There, spread out to the public gaze, was his own record in full, including his initial venture into the Kyak coal-fields, his abandonment of that project in favor of Hope Consolidated, and an account of his connection with the latter enterprise. Eliza had not hesitated to call the mine worthless, and she showed how he, knowing its worthlessness from the first, had used it as a lure to investors. Then followed the story of his efforts to gain a foothold in the railroad struggle, his defeat at the Salmon River Canon, his rout at the delta crossing, and his final death-blow at Kyak. His career stood out boldly in all its fraudulent colors; failure was written across every one of his undertakings. The naked facts showed him visionary, incompetent, unscrupulous. Thus far he had succeeded in keeping a large part of his stock-holders in ignorance of the true condition of Hope Consolidated, but he quailed at the inevitable result of this article, which had been flung far and wide into every city and village in the land. He dared not think of its effect upon his present enterprise, now so auspiciously launched. He had made a ringing appeal to the public, and its support would hinge upon its confidence in him as a man of affairs. Once that trust was destroyed the Cortez Home Railway would crumble as swiftly as had all his other schemes. The worst of it was that he knew himself shut off from the world for five days as effectually as if he were locked in a dungeon. There was no wireless equipment on the ship, he could not start the machinery of his press bureau, and with every hour this damnable story was bound to gain momentum. He cursed the luck which had set him on this quest for vengeance and bound his hands.