The Admiral strolled over to the fort and the club, where he met a semi-public man who was talking to the Commandant about a promising gold "placer" on the Pacific coast which had proved so alluring that he had lost a lot of money in trying to develop it. The Commandant had known of this same placer, for he had been stationed near it at one time; the Admiral also had seen it, for he had been taken to it one day by some men who had hoped to extract some of his savings from him. Lack of water was the trouble, and the Admiral, who had looked carefully over the ground, had devised a plan whereby water might be brought by a tortuous route from a stream several miles distant. When he said this to the semi-public man that person replied: "Give me your plan, and if it is practicable you shall have a large block of stock, for nothing, in the company I'll organize to work it." The Admiral quickly took a letter from his pocket and drew on the back of it a plan of the country as he remembered it. Then he consulted Jermyn, who had dropped into the club. "Very good," said Jermyn, looking at the sketch, "although it might be improved a little, I think. I've done some shooting on that very ground, so I remember it pretty well." "How fortunate," said the Admiral. "Mr. Blogsham, my friend Jermyn is a good engineer, so he may be of more service than I." "Good!" said Blogsham. "The better the plan, the more it will be worth to us. There's a block of stock for you too, Mr. Jermyn, if you can make the water within reach." Jermyn opened the sheet of paper and made another sketch; then he turned the paper over, supposing it might contain some memoranda on the subject, but he saw something that so upset his mind that in the next ten minutes he talked so vaguely about the ground and the water that his own chance of getting any stock in the proposed mine seemed to him very small. CHAPTER X. A SCRAP OF PAPER. Bruce Jermyn was as honorable a gentleman as could be found anywhere, but for two or three days and nights he wished he had read farther in that letter upon which he and the Admiral had made their sketches of the surroundings of the placer mine. No one knew better than he the rights and sanctity of private correspondence, but could any man be blamed for wanting to know who it was who was planning to marry him to Kate Trewman? He could not say that he objected to the lady named in the letter, but who could it be who was charging herself with the conduct of the affair? "Dear old Papa," the letter had begun, and the Admiral being old, and also the possessor of the letter, was undoubtedly the person to whom it was addressed, but who could the writer be? Jermyn knew that the Admiral had at least one daughter, who was a clever woman with some reputation in the service as a match-maker, but she was married and living several hundreds of miles from Old Point.