Running his fingers down the outside of the compartments, he counted the jewels.

“One hundred and four,” he breathed.  “A king’s ransom.  Forty or fifty thousand dollars worth, anyway.  Whew!”

Then he stared and his hand shook.  His eye had fallen upon the stamp of the seal in the corner of the envelope.  He knew that secret mark all too well; had learned it from Wo Cheng.  It was the stamp of the biggest and worst society of Radicals in all the world.

“So!” Johnny whispered to himself.  “So, Mr. Russian, you are a Radical, a red, a Nihilist, a communist, an anything-but-society-as-it-is guy.  You want the world to cough up its dough and own nothing, and yet here you are carrying round the price of a farm in your vest pocket.”  He chuckled.  “Some reformer, I’d say!”

But his next thought sobered him.  What was he to do with all that wealth?  One of those stones would make Mazie happy for a lifetime.  But it wasn’t his.  He had no right to it.  He could not do a thing he’d be ashamed to tell Mazie and his old boss about.

But, if they didn’t belong to him, perhaps the diamonds didn’t belong to the Russian either.  At any rate, the latter’s disloyalty to his nation had forfeited his right to own property.

Even should this Russian be the rightful owner, Johnny could not very well hunt him up and say:  “Here, mister.  You tried to kill me yesterday.  Here are your diamonds.  I found them in the mine.  Please count them and see if they are all there.”

Johnny grinned as he thought of that.  There seemed to be nothing to do but keep the stones, for the time being at least.

“Anyway,” he said to himself as he rolled up in his deer skins.  “I’ll bet I have discovered something.  I’ll bet he’s one of the big ones, perhaps the biggest of them all.  And he’s trying to make his way across to America to stir things up over there.”

CHAPTER VII

SAVED FROM THE MOB

“What do you know about that gold mine?” Johnny asked, turning an inquiring eye on Iyok-ok, whom Johnny now strongly suspected of being a Japanese and a member of the Mikado’s secret service as well.

“Which mine?” Iyok-ok smiled good-naturedly as he blinked in the sunlight.  It was the morning after Johnny’s battle with the Russian.

“Are there others?”

“Seven mines.”

“Seven!  And all of them rich as the one we were in yesterday?”

The boy shrugged his shoulders.

“Some much richer,” he declared.

“How long has the world known of this wealth?”

“Never has known.  A few men know, that’s all.  The old Czar, he knew, but would let no one work the mines.  Just at the last he said ‘Yes.’  Then they hurried much machinery over here, but it was too late.  The Czar—­well, you know he is dead now, but they have their machinery here still.”