41 Lure O Gold 1904

"
The Lure o
Gold
be made, why of course it s all right; but I hope you
understand now how I feel about it."
Well," said I, very respectfully, though I was not a
little wroth because of what he had seen fit to say,
"you
know your duty of course, sir; but about the gold:
It isn t a little sack it s eight sacks, and they contain
over forty thousand dollars."
That
"
may be or may not be," said the ruffled officer.
"It seems likely, doesn t it, that a mere boy like you
should have all that gold in his care ?
I know Doctor
Quaritch says
it s all right; but he s a good-natured,
easy-going man, who s not hard to take in."
I walked away with rising
heat. It was an hour
before I was cool enough to contemplate the situation
calmly. I thought vaguely of going
to the second
officer, Mr. Lovell, and enlisting
his aid. But it oc
curred to me that I should be getting things mixed up
worse than they were. It was plain that Mr. Nason
had been listening to Max Fishley, and that officer had
convinced him that my pretensions concerning the gold
were all false.
It was evident that, while matters were
run rather loosely aboard the Modesto,, there was suffi
cient harmony among
very suspicious
the officers not to make them
of one another s actions. I could do
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