He had a long memory; he never forgot a face or a name. He remembered all about Robert Airley the moment his eyes fell on the letter. It was thirty years before that the Lowland Scotch emigrant, who had none of the proverbial canniness of his race, but was a simple and trustful lad of some twenty-four years old, had come into Kerosene City, one of a wagon-full of weary folks; there were no railways then within a thousand miles. But he did not trust only to memory. He had brought with him to England all his old ledgers, account books, folios of every kind filling many cases, and all now filed, docketed, and arranged in locked cases in a small study of which he kept the key on his watch-chain. He went to this little room now, and, with the precise and orderly recollection for which his brain was conspicuous, went straight to the books which referred to the tenth year of his residence in Dakota. It took him some forty minutes to find the entry which he required, but he did find it. “Paid Robert Airley the sum of one dollar for specimens of tin ore.” “Paid Robert Airley the sum of thirty dollars for his claim at Penamunic.” The transaction was perfectly legitimate and legal. Appended were the receipts of the said Airley and the deed which transferred the land. Twenty-nine years had gone by and the ink had rusted and the paper grown yellow, but the record was there. The fool had sold his bit of prairie land out and out and the tin under the soil of it. He had done it with his eyes open. Who could complain of free contract? To Robert Airley it had seemed a poor bit of soil, good for naught in husbandry, and his young wife had been ailing and her first delivery at hand; and he had been glad to get the dollars to buy her what she wanted. Many men were in the settlement who could have told him not to sell his placer-claim for a mess of pottage, but there was no one who cared to go against Blasted Blizzard, and, in new townships where shooting-irons are arguments, men mind their own business. William Massarene locked up the ledger and the case containing it, and went back to his library. He then sat down and wrote a cypher telegram to his manager in Kerosene City: “Tell platelayer Airley he won’t get a red cent from me. Accident was due to his own carelessness.”