"Good; my word goes with you--which is fortunate for you. These are your orders: You're to say never a word; and you're to proceed with this as though nothing queer was in the wind. As fast as you know anything, you will find that I'll call for it. Do whatever this black-bearded party asks; go with him as far as he wants to go, and go with your eyes shut. I'll step in and get him when the time comes; he's the one I'm after. Now you understand: say nothing, do whatever the black-beard desires; and when I want to see you I'll send. And be careful about London Bill; he's foxy. That was why I let you go by me a moment ago; I didn't know but Bill was fly enough to tail you here. He'll be gone, however, in a day, or at the most two, and then you'll have no more risk with Bill." "How did you know Bill was goin' to-morrow? It wasn't settled thirty minutes ago." "I know it just as I know that you, about May fifteenth, will pick up a dozen or more pals who are whole crooks and half sailors; that you will then leave on a boat, probably a steam yacht, May twenty-sixth, bound for Washington; and that the job of bin-cracking you will engage in is to be pulled off May twenty-seventh to twenty-ninth inclusive." "You know more'n me, Inspector," observed Dan, with wonder undisguised. "If I didn't I wouldn't be telling you what to do. That's all, Dan; have you got your orders straight?" "Straight as a gun," declared Dan, wiping the last drops of the chianti from his mouth. "Screw out then," commanded Inspector Val, "and come only when I send for you." Two days later, a laborer, clean-shaven and of rather superior exterior, fastened a tape measure to the iron cover of a manhole that opened into the drain that ran by the side of the Treasury Building. Tape fastened, the laborer unwound its length along the asphalt for perhaps one hundred feet. Then he began to re-wind the tape into its circular box. As he followed the incoming tape towards the end that was fastened to the manhole cover, winding as he went, he paused for the ghost of a second squarely opposite the little basement door-way in the Treasury Building, where the old watchman stood smoking his pipe on the evening that Storri was told of the gold inside. The old watchman, being on day duty now, was standing in that same door-way, smoking the self-same pipe, and had his ignorant eye listlessly fixed upon the laborer, busy with his measurements. As the laborer paused abreast of the door, he glanced down at the tape. "The even seventy feet from the center of that manhole," he murmured, as though he thus registered the figures in his mind. And the old watchman, and the pedestrians hurrying along the pavement, thought the laborer busy with his measurements from the manhole to the little Treasury door had been at work for the public.