Standing precariously on the loose-piled bricks of the fireplace, he looked over the ravaged room.  He felt profoundly discouraged.  Success in this search meant more to him than he liked to think about, and now his chance of success had shrunk to the vanishing point.  The bowels of the room lay open before his eye, and there was no hiding-place in them.  He knew of nowhere else to look.  The cold fear seized him that the money and the papers were hidden beyond his finding—­that they lay tucked away in some safety-deposit vault in New York, where his eye would never hunt them out.

Surface’s son leaned against the elaborate mantel, illimitably weary.  He shifted his position ever so little; and thereupon luck did for him what reason would never have done.  The brick on which his right foot rested turned under his weight and he lost his foothold.  To save himself, he caught the mantel-top with both hands, and the next moment pitched heavily backward to the floor.

The mantel, in fact, had come off in his hands.  It pitched to the floor with him, speeding his fall, thumping upon his chest like a vigorous adversary.  But the violence of his descent only made him the more sharply aware that this strange mantel had left its moorings as though on greased rollers.

His heart playing a sudden drum-beat, he threw the carven timber from him and bounded to his feet.  The first flying glance showed him the strange truth:  his blundering feet had marvelously stumbled into his father’s arcana.  For he looked, not at an unsightly mass of splintered laths and torn wall-paper and shattered plaster, but into as neat a little cupboard as a man could wish.

The cupboard was as wide as the mantel itself; lined and ceiled with a dark red wood which beautifully threw back the glare of the dancing gas-jet.  It was half-full of things, old books, letters, bundles of papers held together with rubber bands, canvas bags—­all grouped and piled in the most orderly way about a large tin dispatch-box.  This box drew the young man’s gaze like a sudden shout; he was hardly on his feet before he had sprung forward and jerked it out.  Instantly the treacherous bricks threw him again; sprawled on the floor he seized one of them and smashed through the hasp at a blow.

Bit by bit the illuminating truth came out.  In all his own calculations, close and exact as he had thought them, he had lost sight of one simple but vital fact.  In the years that he had been in prison, his father had spent no money beyond the twenty-five dollars a month to Tim Queed; and comparatively little in the years of his wanderings.  In all this time the interest upon his “nest-egg” had been steadily accumulating.  Five per cent railroad bonds, and certificates of deposit in four different banks, were the forms in which the money had been tucked away, by what devilish cleverness could only be imagined.  But the simple fact was that his father had died worth not less than two hundred thousand dollars and probably more.  And this did not include the house, which, it appeared, his father had bought, and not leased as he said; nor did it include four thousand four hundred dollars in gold and banknotes which he found in the canvas sacks after his first flying calculation was made.