“Then why don’t you say where, you awful child?”

“Don’t want to!”

Johnny would have liked to add that he saw no reason why he should tell.  Other people who found gold were not obliged to tell.  There was Jim Brody, who had struck a lead and kept the locality secret.  Nobody forced him to tell.  Nobody called him a thief; nobody had dragged him about by the arm until he showed it.  Why was it wrong that a little boy should find gold?  It wasn’t agin the Commandments.  Mr. Staples had never got up and said, “Thou shalt not find gold!” His mother had never made him pray not to find it!  The schoolmaster had never read him awful stories of boys who found gold and never said anything about it, and so came to a horrid end.  All this crowded his small boy’s mind, and, crowding, choked his small boy’s utterance.

“You jest wait till your father comes home,” said Mrs. Medliker, “and he’ll see whether you ‘want to’ or not.  And now get yourself off to bed and stay there.”

Johnny knew that his father—­whose teams had increased to five wagons, and whose route extended forty miles further—­was not due for a week, and that the catastrophe was yet remote.  His present punishment he had expected.  He went into the adjoining bedroom, which he occupied with his sister, and began to undress.  He lingered for some time over one stocking, and finally cautiously removed from it a small piece of flake gold which he had kept concealed all day under his big toe, to the great discomfort of that member.  But this was only a small, ordinary self-martyrdom of boyhood.  He scratched a boyish hieroglyphic on the metal, and when his mother’s back was turned scraped a small hole in the adobe wall, inserted the gold in it, and covered it up with a plaster made of the moistened debris.  It was safe—­so was his secret—­for it need not, perhaps, be stated here that Johnny had told the truth and had honestly found the gold!  But where?—­yes, that was his own secret!  And now, Johnny, with the instinct of all young animals, dismissed the whole subject from his mind, and, reclining comfortably upon his arm, fell into an interesting study of the habits of the red ant as exemplified in a crack of the adobe wall, and with the aid of a burnt match succeeded in diverting for the rest of the afternoon the attention of a whole laborious colony.

The next morning, however, brought trouble to him in the curiosity of his sisters, heightened by their belief that he could at any moment be taken off to prison—­which was their understanding of their mother’s story.  I grieve to say that to them this invested him with a certain romantic heroism, from the gratification of which the hero himself was not exempt.  Nevertheless, he successfully evaded their questioning, and on broader impersonal grounds.  As girls, it was none of their business!  He wasn’t a-going to tell them his secrets!  And what did they know about gold, anyway?  They