“I shall sell as little liquor as possible,” the druggist says, conceiving the drift of Corkey’s ideas.

“Pardner, you must have been a hard drinker yourself.  How did your voice get so husky?”

“It was so always.”

“It was so the first day I met you.  Remember the dedication?”

“Yes; do you remember the bank?”

“Yep.  Don’t you know I tell you I was going to find that yawl?”

“I do.”

“Well, I find it.”

Does David Lockwin color?  Or are those features forever crimson?

“You do look like a man as has been a red-hot sport in his day.  Ever do anything in the ring?  Let me try that red liquor of yours.  Let’s see if it tears.  Oh, yes, about the yawl.  I just go to the widow the other day and ask her for three hundred cases on the search.  Well, she give me the three hundred and want me to take more, and I go right to Collingwood.  The duck he show me the boat, and you bet your sweet life I hid her where she never will be seen.  What’s the use of tearing up the widow’s feelings again?”

“You did right!” says the husky voice, the lover all the time wishing the discovery had been published.  He feels like a claimant.  He is not sure the world would believe David Lockwin to be alive if he could prove it.

“Chalmers, I’m going to tell you something that I haven’t said to nobody.  I hid that boat, and I threw away big money—­I know I did.  But I could get all the money I wanted of her—­a free graft.  Give me another slug of that budge.”

The druggist is filling a small graduate with whisky for Corkey.  What is Corkey about to say?

“They’re having high old times in Russia.  That was a great bomb they git in on his nobs last winter.”

“The czar?  Yes.”

“I reckon they’re going to git the feller they’ve got on top there now, too, don’t you?  They say he put on ten crowns yesterday.  What do they call it?  The coronation, yes.  What’s the name of the place?  Moscow, yes.”

The druggist is less confused.

“Wouldn’t it be funny if the czar wasn’t dead.  But say, pardner, what would you say if I went over there and told my widow I didn’t believe her old man was dead at all?  Would she give me the gaff?  Would she git mad?”

The druggist is busy finding a cork for a bottle.  At last he comes to the light to try the cork.  He is behind a show-case.  Corkey is in front of the, case holding a newspaper in hand, out of which he has been reading of the coronation.  His black eyes seem to pierce David Lockwin’s face.  David Lockwin looks back—­in hope, if any feeling can show itself in that veiled countenance.

“He ain’t dead!  Not much!  Can’t tell me!  I don’t bury boats for nothing.  I tell you I think a heap of her, and she slung herself so on that hospital and on that other thing there, out north, that I’d hate to give her away.  What was that yawl buried for?  Nobody see it and it was worth money, too.  What was it buried for?  Now I never tell you the story of the night on the old tub.  He sit just so.”