This circumstance, coming on the back of the monstrous improbabilities of the sale, was enough to have shaken the reason of Immanuel Kant.  The earth seemed banded together to defeat them; the stones and the boys on the street appeared to be in possession of their guilty secret.  Flight was their one thought.  The treasure of the Currency Lass they packed in waist-belts, expressed their chests to an imaginary address in British Columbia, and left San Francisco the same afternoon, booked for Los Angeles.

The next day they pursued their retreat by the Southern Pacific route, which Carthew followed on his way to England; but the other three branched off for Mexico.

EPILOGUE: 

TO WILL H. LOW.

DEAR LOW:  The other day (at Manihiki of all places) I had the pleasure to meet Dodd.  We sat some two hours in the neat, little, toy-like church, set with pews after the manner of Europe, and inlaid with mother-of-pearl in the style (I suppose) of the New Jerusalem.  The natives, who are decidedly the most attractive inhabitants of this planet, crowded round us in the pew, and fawned upon and patted us; and here it was I put my questions, and Dodd answered me.

I first carried him back to the night in Barbizon when Carthew told his story, and asked him what was done about Bellairs.  It seemed he had put the matter to his friend at once, and that Carthew took it with an inimitable lightness.  “He’s poor, and I’m rich,” he had said.  “I can afford to smile at him.  I go somewhere else, that’s all—­somewhere that’s far away and dear to get to.  Persia would be found to answer, I fancy.  No end of a place, Persia.  Why not come with me?” And they had left the next afternoon for Constantinople, on their way to Teheran.  Of the shyster, it is only known (by a newspaper paragraph) that he returned somehow to San Francisco and died in the hospital.

“Now there’s another point,” said I.  “There you are off to Persia with a millionaire, and rich yourself.  How come you here in the South Seas, running a trader?”

He said, with a smile, that I had not yet heard of Jim’s last bankruptcy.  “I was about cleaned out once more,” he said; “and then it was that Carthew had this schooner built, and put me in as supercargo.  It’s his yacht and it’s my trader; and as nearly all the expenses go to the yacht, I do pretty well.  As for Jim, he’s right again:  one of the best businesses, they say, in the West, fruit, cereals, and real estate; and he has a Tartar of a partner now—­Nares, no less.  Nares will keep him straight, Nares has a big head.  They have their country-places next door at Saucelito, and I stayed with them time about, the last time I was on the coast.  Jim had a paper of his own—­I think he has a notion of being senator one of these days—­and he wanted me to throw up the schooner and come and write his editorials.  He holds strong views on the State Constitution, and so does Mamie.”