“Anybody in this camp look like this?”

Tarpaulin started.

“That’s a funny question,” said he; “let’s see who and what the fellow is.”

And then Tarpaulin started for the next hut.  Jim waited some time, and hearing low voices in earnest conversation, went next door himself.

Tarpaulin was not there, but two small, thin, sharp-eyed men were there, displaying an old-fashioned daguerreotype of a handsome-looking young man, dressed in the latest New York style; and more than this Jim did not notice.

“Don’t know him, mister,” said Colonel Two, who happened to be the owner of the hut.  “Besides ef, as is most likely, he’s growed long hair an’ a beard since he left the States, his own mother wouldn’t know him from George Washington.  Brother o’ yourn?”

“No,” said one of the thin men; “he’s—­well, the fact is, we’ll give a thousand dollars to any one who’ll find him for us in twenty-four hours.”

“Deppity sheriffs?” asked the colonel, retiring somewhat hastily under his blankets.

“About the same thing,” said one of the thin men, with a sickly smile.

“Git!” roared the colonel, suddenly springing from his bed, and cocking his revolver.  “I b’lieve in the Golden Rule, I do!”

The detectives, with the fine instinct peculiar to their profession, rightly construed the colonel’s action as a hint, and withdrew, and Jim retired to his own hut, and fell asleep while waiting for his partner.

Morning came, but no Tarpaulin; dinner-time arrived, but Jim ate alone, and was rather blue.  He loved a sociable chat, and of late Tarpaulin had been almost his sole companion.

Evening came, but Tarpaulin came not.

Jim couldn’t abide the saloon for a whole evening, so he lit a candle in his own hut, and attempted to read.

Tarpaulin was a lover of newspapers—­it seemed to Jim he received more papers than all the remaining miners put together.

Jim thought he would read some of these same papers, and unrolled Tarpaulin’s blankets to find them, when out fell a picture-case, opening as it fell.  Jim was about to close it again, when he suddenly started, and exclaimed: 

“Millicent Botayne!”

He held it under the light, and examined it closely.

There could be no doubt as to identity—­there were the same exquisite features which, a few months before, had opened to Jim Hockson a new world of beauty, and had then, with a sweet yet sad smile, knocked down all his fair castles, and destroyed all his exquisite pictures.

Strange that it should appear to him now, and so unexpectedly, but stranger did it seem to Jim that on the opposite side of the case should be a portrait which was a duplicate of the one shown by the detectives!

“That rascal Brown!” exclaimed Jim.  “So he succeeded in getting her, did he?  But I shouldn’t call him names; he had as much right to make love to her as I. God grant he may make her happy!  And he is probably a very fine fellow—­must be, by his looks.”