‘By the holy, your fortune’s made if there’s much o’ this!’ he blurted at length.

‘Think there’s heaps of it,’ said Dick coolly.

‘When can we go to it?’

‘When the detective cove comes, an’ I’ve told him ‘bout somethin’.’

‘Somethin’ good for us, Dick?’ asked Harry anxiously.

Dick nodded his head slowly several times.

‘Well, if this don’t lick cock-fighting.  Have you told your mother?’

‘No,’ said Dick.

‘Nothing about this either?  How’s that?’

‘Oh,’ said Dick with a man’s superiority, ’she wouldn’t understand.  She don’t know nothin’ ‘bout minin’, you know.’

Harry looked down upon his young friend curiously for a moment.

‘D’you know,’ he said, ‘you’re a most amazing kind of a kid?’

‘How?’ asked Dick shortly.

‘Why in the way you get mixed up in things.’

‘Tain’t my fault if things happen, is it?’ asked the boy in an injured tone.

‘S’pose it ain’t,’ replied Harry with a grin; ’but they all seem to come your way somehow.  Look here—­it can’t matter now—­tell me how you came to be in the Stream drive that night?’

Dick kicked up a tuft of grass, bored one heel into the soft turf, and answered nothing.

‘Come on, old man, I won’t turn dog.’

‘I’m goin’ to tell it to Detective Downy first.  ‘Twasn’t nothin’ much anyhow.  I jes’ went down.’

Dick would say nothing more.  He found himself on the side of the law for the first time, and felt he owed a duty to Downy, whom he regarded as almost as great a man as Sam Sagacious.  Downy had come to his rescue in an hour of dire peril, Downy had trusted him and taken him into his confidence to some extent, and he was determined to do the fair and square thing by the detective, at least so far as he could do so without interfering with his sacred obligation to handsome, unhappy Christina Shine.

The detective returned to the township in the afternoon to prosecute the search for Ephraim, of whom nothing had yet been heard.  In the presence of his mother and Mrs. Hardy and Harry, Dick faced the officer to tell his story; but he found it hard to begin.

‘Well, my lad,’ said Downy, ‘you’re going to tell all you know?’

Dick nodded, abashed by his new importance.

‘Out with it then.  You were in that drive?’

‘Yes.’

‘You went down with Rogers and Shine?’

‘I didn’t.’

‘Very well, my boy, how did you go?’

’Went by myself.  Out of a drive what I know into the Red Hand workin’s, an’ down the Red Hand ladders.’

‘But why?  Go ahead—­why?’

‘To—­to drag Harry out o’ the water.’

There were three distinct gasps at this, and even the detective’s eyelids went up a trifle.

‘Go on, Dick.’

Now having started, Dick told his story in full.  The incidents were not told consecutively, and he needed considerable cross-examining before the tale was properly fitted together and his audience of four had grasped the full details.  Then Mrs. Hardy arose from her seat and moved towards him somewhat unsteadily; knelt by his side, took him in her arms softly and quietly, kissed him, and said in a very low voice: