That was the way I found them when a hurry call brought me to the boarding-house. I thought at first they were both dead. It gave me the horrors to hear Crigg tell me that I was to copy that tattoo mark. ’Twas like working on a dead man. One drunk, the other drugged, lying on a little, cheap old bed and Spotty, who wasn’t a nice, clean-looking sort of person anyway, leaning over them with a candle. When he told what he wanted, I kicked until he put on the screws. He could drive me off the water-front if he cared. I knew that, and he reminded me of it, besides offering me fifty dollars. So at last I went at it, he telling me all the time to hurry. I never worked so fast in my life. By two hours you couldn’t tell one mark from the other, except that Maidslow’s was new and Letterblair’s old. Next we shaved Maidslow’s mustache off, for Tom always wore a smooth face. Then we changed their clothes, putting the swell rig on Maidslow and the old clothes on Letterblair. Next, Spotty Crigg took Maidslow, got him into a hack, drove him to a dory he had waiting, and rowed out to the _Treasure Trove_, which was in the stream waiting to sail next morning. Captain Wynch was cussing purple because Spotty had been so long. He went over the description, though, and looked at the right arm to make sure, just as Crigg expected him to do. It looked all right, because a tattoo mark don’t begin to swell until the day after; besides, Wynch was seeing it under a fo’castle lamp. It was all right so far. But Crigg, who wasn’t so keen by a jugful as he thought he was, hadn’t figured on one thing. The Letterblairs had an aunt, Mrs. Burden, a widow without chick or child of her own. She was an old, religious lady, with oodles of money and a whopping temper—a regular holy terror. She didn’t cotton to the sisters at all; in fact, hated them, but she was soft over Tom Letterblair. Whenever she wasn’t turning loose her money, stringing hospitals and churches all the way to Sacramento, she was handing it over to the kid, who had only an allowance until he got to be twenty-one. He and the parsons were the only ones who got her to loosen up. She had no son and I rather guess that on the quiet she had a sneaking liking for the way he was carrying on. Sort of thrilled her. You know how some of those pious old girls like a man that’s real bad. She coddled him to death and fought the sisters for being hard on the boy. Spotty’s luck turned so that she picked the very next morning for a show-down with the sisters over the way they were treating the kid. There must have been a regular hair-pulling. Anyway, before they got through, Mrs. Sunderland was so mad that she poured out the whole scheme in one mouthful. She said: “You won’t have a chance to coddle _him_ any more! He’s on the _Treasure Trove_, bound for China to get the foolishness taken out of him. He’s passed the Farralones by this time.”