He was looking at a square, uncompromising wall-safe, with a round figured disk of white metal on its face. He knelt before it and tried its knob. After a moment it turned easily. But the resolute steel door would not open, though he tried every combination that came into his mind. “No use,” he said disgustedly. “One must have the right numbers.” Then he lifted his fretted frame and smote his grimy hands together. “Confound it!” he said with a short laugh. “Here I am, a bankrupt, with all this outfit—clear to the very finger-bowls—handed [Pg 249]to me on a silver tray, and I’m mad as scat because I can’t open the first locked thing I find!” He ran up-stairs and donned a rough corduroy jacket and high leather leggings. “We’re going to climb the hill to-day, Chum,” he announced, “and no more moccasins need apply.” In the lower hall, however, he suddenly stopped stock-still. “The slip of paper that was in the china dog!” he exclaimed. “What a chump I am not to have thought of it!” He found it in its pigeonhole and, kneeling down before the safe, tried the numbers carefully, first right, then left: 17—28—94—0. The heavy door opened. “I was right!” he exulted. “It’s the plate.” He drew it out, piece by piece. Each was bagged in dark-red Canton flannel. He broke the tape of one bag and exposed a great silver pitcher, tarnished purple-blue like a raven’s wing—then a tea-service. Each piece, large and small, was marked with the greyhound rampant and the motto. “And to think,” he said, “that my great-great-grandfather buried you with his own hands under the stables when Tarleton’s raiders swept the valley before the surrender at Yorktown! Only wait till Aunt Daphne gets you polished up, and on the sideboard! You’re the one thing the place has needed!” With the dog for comrade he traversed the garden and plunged across the valley below, humming [Pg 250]as he went one of the songs with which Uncle Jefferson was wont to regale his labors: “My gran’mothah lived on yondah li’l green, Fines’ ol’ lady evah wuz seen. Tummy-eye, tummy-oh, tummy-umpy-tumpy-tee. Fines’ ol’ lady evah yo’ see!” The ridiculous refrain rang out through the bewildering vistas of the wooded slope as he swung on, up the hill, through the underbrush.