They all went to New York that night. While Jermyn visited the Department for his order, the Admiral scoured Washington for the projector of the gold mine, who had been in the city the day before, but as the man had already returned to the metropolis, the Admiral intended to be at his elbow, to keep the promise of stock alive until the sketches could be obtained. Should there seem to be any danger, he would promptly break the armistice and ask Trif for the fateful letter. Suddenly, however, while the two officers were smoking together on the train, Jermyn struck terror to the Admiral's heart by saying: "Your plan for reclaiming those pictures may be of no good. 'Tis more than likely that Highwood has destroyed that letter." "My dear boy!" exclaimed the old man. "Please don't imagine anything so dreadful! Destroyed one hundred thousand dollars? Horrors!" "I think it likely," continued Jermyn, "for at Old Point I chanced to hear Mrs. Highwood say that after carefully reading her husband's letters she always destroyed them, so that no one else by any chance could see them. Like husband, like wife--you know the old saying." "But you saw the letter in Highwood's own hands," said the Admiral. "True; but at that time his wife was away, and I suppose he kept all of her letters to look at again and again--I am sure I should do so, if I were married and my wife was away from me." "Good boy! I'm glad to see that you already know the feeling. Still--if he should have destroyed them!" It was the Admiral's turn to be strangely silent during the evening, and the ladies marvelled greatly at the change in a man who had seemed to them the life of whatever company he chanced to be in, and Kate found opportunity to whisper to Trif that Jermyn did not seem to be entirely under the Admiral's thumb after all, for he seemed to be in remarkably good spirits--commanding spirits, indeed, she could say. At a part of the road over which the train passed early in the night, Jermyn begged the ladies to go with him to the rear platform to observe a beautiful moonlight landscape which he knew of old. The Admiral, who remained behind with Trixy, soon began to sketch on the back of a letter. The shrewd old chap had argued to himself that if the letter had really been destroyed there could be nothing dishonorable in duplicating his own sketch on the back of another letter, and offering it in evidence. It would be virtually the same picture, for he would draw it from memory, as before. He worked so long that Trixy, wishing to do something new, began to look over his shoulder, and soon she exclaimed: "Why-y-y! I've got a picture just like that." "You have?" replied the Admiral, carelessly. "That's strange; where did you get it?" "I tore it off a letter--the back of that letter that came from the fort one day, for you, don't you know, and I opened it by mistake while I was----"