“Bellairs will go to sixty thousand; it’s my belief, if he were properly handled, he would take the hundred,” replied Pinkerton.  “Look back on the way the sale ran at the end.”

“That is my own impression as regards Bellairs,” I admitted.  “The point I am trying to make is that Bellairs himself may be mistaken; that what he supposed to be a round sum was really an outside figure.”

“Well, Loudon, if that is so,” said Jim, with extraordinary gravity of face and voice, “if that is so, let him take the Flying Scud at fifty thousand, and joy go with her!  I prefer the loss.”

“Is that so, Jim?  Are we dipped as bad as that?” I cried.

“We’ve put our hand farther out than we can pull it in again, Loudon,” he replied.  “Why, man, that fifty thousand dollars, before we get clear again, will cost us nearer seventy.  Yes, it figures up overhead to more than ten per cent a month; and I could do no better, and there isn’t the man breathing could have done as well.  It was a miracle, Loudon.  I couldn’t but admire myself.  O, if we had just the four months!  And you know, Loudon, it may still be done.  With your energy and charm, if the worst comes to the worst, you can run that schooner as you ran one of your picnics; and we may have luck.  And, O, man! if we do pull it through, what a dashing operation it will be!  What an advertisement! what a thing to talk of, and remember all our lives!  However,” he broke off suddenly, “we must try the safe thing first.  Here’s for the shyster!”

There was another struggle in my mind, whether I should even now admit my knowledge of the Mission Street address.  But I had let the favourable moment slip.  I had now, which made it the more awkward, not merely the original discovery, but my late suppression to confess.  I could not help reasoning, besides, that the more natural course was to approach the principal by the road of his agent’s office; and there weighed upon my spirits a conviction that we were already too late, and that the man was gone two hours ago.  Once more, then, I held my peace; and after an exchange of words at the telephone to assure ourselves he was at home, we set out for the attorney’s office.

The endless streets of any American city pass, from one end to another, through strange degrees and vicissitudes of splendour and distress, running under the same name between monumental warehouses, the dens and taverns of thieves, and the sward and shrubbery of villas.  In San Francisco, the sharp inequalities of the ground, and the sea bordering on so many sides, greatly exaggerate these contrasts.  The street for which we were now bound took its rise among blowing sands, somewhere in view of the Lone Mountain Cemetery; ran for a term across that rather windy Olympus of Nob Hill, or perhaps just skirted its frontier; passed almost immediately after through a stage of little houses, rather impudently painted, and offering to the eye of the observer this