In the last ten years I have learned money-honesty. I have come to like it, it has become a habit. I practice it daily. Some day I may learn to laugh at the loss of that forty-eight hundred, but I’ll never learn to like laughing over it. It will never become a habit to be practiced daily. Slumping off the horse, I threw the bridle rein over his head, left him standing patiently in the street, and walked stiffly over to the building. As near as I could judge one corner of it was directly over the spot where I made my plant. The front and one side of it covered the line where the decayed fence had formerly marked the boundary of the lot. Small barred windows in the cement foundation showed there was a basement and crushed my hopes that the money might be under the building. A careful survey of the place convinced me that the payroll was gone and there was no use in hanging around and inviting another pinch. Right here I should have muttered a string of oaths, thrown myself into the saddle, sunk my spurs, rowel deep, into the flanks of my horse, and dashed madly out of town. Sore from the long ride, I was barely able to throw a stiff leg over the saddle and settle down in it. Turning the horse’s head in the direction of his home, I threw the reins on his neck and let him jog along as he liked. I was crushed. It was an hour before I could think rationally. Then the question came into my mind that is in your mind now, reader. Who got the money? I wish I could tell you, but I can’t. I don’t know. I wish I could tell what became of Julia, the girl from Madam Singleton’s. I wish I could tell you what was done at the Diamond Palace when the tray of stones was missed, and whether Chew Chee, the Chinese boy, was recaptured and had to go to prison. I can’t answer any of those questions. The nature of my business was such that I preferred to leave them unanswered rather than bring disaster by inquiring too closely. I know the mine payroll never got back into the owner’s hands. I assume it was found by a laborer, who kept it. The reconstruction of the finding of my money and the picturing of its finder furnished me with many hours of mental relaxation. Lying in the dungeon or in the hop joint or on the grass in the public parks, I pieced it together painfully. But never could I see the lucky finder as an honest man; nor by any effort of imagination could I ever picture him as putting the money to any good use. In the end, he always turned out to be a drunken, dissolute day laborer, sweating in the sun as he dug out the ditch for the foundation of that building. I saw him turn up the leather pouch with his shovel, seize it, open it stealthily, and thrust it inside his shirt. Then he threw down his shovel, walked over to the boss, and demanded his “time.” I heard the foreman say: “All right, you’re no good anyway. I was going to fire you to-night.”