“Er—­why—­tell her you’re my sister, Mary Josephine, and if it’s Miss Kirkstone, be nice to her and say I’m not able to come to the ’phone, and that you’re looking forward to meeting her, and that we’ll be up to see her some time today.”

“Oh, indeed!”

“You see,” said Keith, his mouth close to the door, “you see, this Miss Kirkstone—­”

But Mary Josephine was gone.

Keith grinned.  His illimitable optimism was returning.  Sufficient for the day that she was there, that she loved him, that she belonged to him, that just now he was the arbiter of her destiny!  Far off in the mountains he dreamed of, alone, just they two, what might not happen?  Some day—­

With the cold chisel and the hammer he went to the chest.  His task was one that numbed his hands before the last of the three locks was broken.  He dragged the chest more into the light and opened it.  He was disappointed.  At first glance he could not understand why Conniston had locked it at all.  It was almost empty, so nearly empty that he could see the bottom of it, and the first object that met his eyes was an insult to his expectations—­an old sock with a huge hole in the toe of it.  Under the sock was an old fur cap not of the kind worn north of Montreal.  There was a chain with a dog-collar attached to it, a hip-pocket pistol and a huge forty-five, and not less than a hundred cartridges of indiscriminate calibers scattered loosely about.  At one end, bundled in carelessly, was a pair of riding-breeches, and under the breeches a pair of white shoes with rubber soles.  There was neither sentiment nor reason to the collection in the chest.  It was junk.  Even the big forty-five had a broken hammer, and the pistol, Keith thought, might have stunned a fly at close range.  He pawed the things over with the cold chisel, and the last thing he came upon—­buried under what looked like a cast-off sport shirt—­was a pasteboard shoe box.  He raised the cover.  The box was full of papers.

Here was promise.  He transported the box to Brady’s table and sat down.  He examined the larger papers first.  There were a couple of old game licenses for Manitoba, half a dozen pencil-marked maps, chiefly of the Peace River country, and a number of letters from the secretaries of Boards of Trade pointing out the incomparable possibilities their respective districts held for the homesteader and the buyer of land.  Last of all came a number of newspaper clippings and a packet of letters.

Because they were loose he seized upon the clippings first, and as his eyes fell upon the first paragraph of the first clipping his body became suddenly tensed in the shock of unexpected discovery and amazed interest.  There were six of the clippings, all from English papers, English in their terseness, brief as stock exchange reports, and equally to the point.  He read the six in three minutes.

They simply stated that Derwent Conniston, of the Connistons of Darlington, was wanted for burglary—­and that up to date he had not been found.