to his precipitate departure, nor any suggestion of a reason for it.  For two or three days Uncle Billy was staggered and bewildered; in his profound simplicity he wondered if his extraordinary good fortune that night had made him deaf to some explanation of his partner’s, or, more terrible, if he had shown some “low” and incredible intimation of taking his partner’s extravagant bet as real and binding.  In this distress he wrote to Uncle Jim an appealing and apologetic letter, albeit somewhat incoherent and inaccurate, and bristling with misspelling, camp slang, and old partnership jibes.  But to this elaborate epistle he received only Uncle Jim’s repeated assurances of his own bright prospects, and his hopes that his old partner would be more fortunate, single-handed, on the old claim.  For a whole week or two Uncle Billy sulked, but his invincible optimism and good humor got the better of him, and he thought only of his old partner’s good fortune.  He wrote him regularly, but always to one address—­a box at the San Francisco post-office, which to the simple-minded Uncle Billy suggested a certain official importance.  To these letters Uncle Jim responded regularly but briefly.

From a certain intuitive pride in his partner and his affection, Uncle Billy did not show these letters openly to the camp, although he spoke freely of his former partner’s promising future, and even read them short extracts.  It is needless to say that the camp did not accept Uncle Billy’s story with unsuspecting confidence.  On the contrary, a hundred surmises, humorous or serious, but always extravagant, were afloat in Cedar Camp.  The partners had quarreled over their clothes—­Uncle Jim, who was taller than Uncle Billy, had refused to wear his partner’s trousers.  They had quarreled over cards—­Uncle Jim had discovered that Uncle Billy was in possession of a “cold deck,” or marked pack.  They had quarreled over Uncle Billy’s carelessness in grinding up half a box of “bilious pills” in the morning’s coffee.  A gloomily imaginative mule-driver had darkly suggested that, as no one had really seen Uncle Jim leave the camp, he was still there, and his bones would yet be found in one of the ditches; while a still more credulous miner averred that what he had thought was the cry of a screech-owl the night previous to Uncle Jim’s disappearance, might have been the agonized utterance of that murdered man.  It was highly characteristic of that camp—­and, indeed, of others in California—­that nobody, not even the ingenious theorists themselves, believed their story, and that no one took the slightest pains to verify or disprove it.  Happily, Uncle Billy never knew it, and moved all unconsciously in this atmosphere of burlesque suspicion.  And then a singular change took place in the attitude of the camp towards him and the disrupted partnership.  Hitherto, for no reason whatever, all had agreed to put the blame upon Billy—­possibly because he was present to receive it.  As days passed that