"I am not!" I said, "I came here last night to look for a boat I had been cruising in. They made me stay here over night,--Mr. Snider and the Professor did, but I'm going back on the steamer with you." "How do they work this fake anyhow?" I stared at him. "Oh, come! You know it's a fake as well as I do. I knew it was one before I came,--anything that Bowditch is in is always a fake. I'm sort of sorry, you know, to see these old roosters getting skinned so badly. It'll do some of them good, for believing in Bowditch,--he never had to do with anything straight yet." "Why do they believe in him now?" "Oh, it's Chick. Chick is an innocent old Betty, he's as much fooled as the others. He told me that he had put a thousand into this a week ago, and I don't doubt he has. Bowditch would have got a few of them,--there are always some who believe in a wind-bag, no matter how many bunco games he has been in, but Chick got most of them. Who knows anything about Snider? Now I've seen him, I wouldn't let him hold my coat while I ran across the street and back,--not if there was two cents in the coat that I ever wanted to see again. But they swallow him because Chick does, I guess. And Chick does because Bowditch does. And there you are... Where's this Professor? Everything Chick and Bowditch told us while they were rounding us up for this trip was about the Professor. It was Professor this and Professor that,--and now we get here, and he isn't to be seen. What's happened to him?" "He went to Lanesport just before the steamer came." "Did you see him go?" "Why, yes...I..." "Did you really see him set out on the road and depart?" "Well, no...I don't know that I did. He went around one corner of the house, as I went around the other with Snider... Why? What do you mean?" "He aint down under the wharf salting these gold-boxes or doing some other kind of monkey business with 'em? Hey?" "Why, no," I persisted, weakly, "he's gone to Lanesport, I tell you." But the idea struck me for the first time,--"down under the wharf,"--that was where I had seen them both yesterday. "Gone to Lanesport?" he continued, "but you say yourself that you have only his word for it. Why should he go there today? That looked fishy to me, right on the start. Now the easiest way to account for that trick Snider did out there on the wharf is that there's someone down there hitching on another box or stuffing in that gold. It was a pretty good trick, and you saw how it took with them." "But they say that was real gold, and that those nuggets are real."