“Mr. Dewey said he’d rather pay twice the wages I’d lose than miss a chance of tripping up Arthur Hoyt.  So I gave up everything and played what they call shadow.  I was mighty awkward about it at first, but after awhile I got so I could follow him and he never suspect.  Well, among other things, I followed him to Mr. Mortimer’s and listened to their talk under the library window.  I couldn’t catch it all, but I caught enough to make out that Mr. Mortimer had no idea that Hoyt was going to make an end of you, and that he was terribly broken up about it.  But somehow it seemed that Hoyt had mixed him up in it so that it could be made to look as if Mortimer had really killed you.”

“Oh, the villain!” exclaimed Harry.

“Isn’t he, though?  He made Mortimer give him four hundred thousand dollars of the money that had been stolen from your father—­”

“Did you find out how it had been stolen?” interrupted Harry, eagerly.

“Not a word about that.  Then, at the last, Hoyt made him give him some shares in a mine, and said he was going to investigate the mine.  I expected that would end the shadowing, but Mr. Dewey said I was to keep after him if it took all the money he had in the bank, and I guess it did just that.  The long and short of it being that Mr. Dewey gave me two hundred dollars, and I was to follow Hoyt as far as the money would take me, and Mr. Dewey was to look after mother and Beth.”

“What a friend he is!” cried Harry.  “And you, too, Bill.  I don’t see why I make such friends.”

“Don’t you?” asked Bill.  “Ah, well, I do!  I followed Hoyt, and there wouldn’t have been any trouble at all if it hadn’t been that he stopped all along the way to have a good time spending his stolen money.  I lost my ticket by that time.  You know you can’t stop off on ordinary tickets, and it cost me two tickets before I learned how to be ready for him.  But, anyhow, he stopped so often and led me such a chase that by the time he had been a week in San Francisco I was teetotally broke.”

“And all that for me!” said Harry, gratefully.

“Get out!” cried Bill.  “I was having no end of a lark.  Why, I was seeing the world, Harry, and doing some good at the same time.  But I was stumped when he left San Francisco one day for Virginia City.  Then I was fixed and no mistake.  I puzzled my brains over it until I just had to steal rides on freight trains.  I only minded one thing, and that was that when I reached Virginia City I would possibly find him gone so I couldn’t trace him.”

“You had no money, so took your chances on the freight trains and reached Virginia City at last?” said Harry, who was listening with both interest and admiration.

“Yes; and he was gone.”

“Oh, dear!” was Harry’s fervent comment.  “But you have pluck, Bill.”

“Bulldog kind,” laughed Bill.  “I know how to stick to a thing when I get hold.  I did to him.  If he’d been the right sort, though, I’d never have found him again.  He’s an awful gambler.  Oh, he gambled everywhere he stopped!  He seemed to know just where to find the places.  I’ll bet anything that he’s lost a big pile of money.  Anyhow, he’d gambled in Virginia City till everybody in that line knew him, and it was from some of them that I found out where he’d gone.”