“He aint down under the wharf salting these gold-boxes or doing some other kind of monkey business with ’em?  Hey?”

“Why, no,” I persisted, weakly, “he’s gone to Lanesport, I tell you.”

But the idea struck me for the first time,—­“down under the wharf,”—­that was where I had seen them both yesterday.

“Gone to Lanesport?” he continued, “but you say yourself that you have only his word for it.  Why should he go there today?  That looked fishy to me, right on the start.  Now the easiest way to account for that trick Snider did out there on the wharf is that there’s someone down there hitching on another box or stuffing in that gold.  It was a pretty good trick, and you saw how it took with them.”

“But they say that was real gold, and that those nuggets are real.”

“Of course they’re real.  What of it?  They could buy that amount of gold ten times over—­twenty times over—­with what they’ve taken in this morning.  And they expect another boat-load of suckers this afternoon.  And this is only the beginning,—­Snider’s been rustling around amongst a lot of women and old people over in Lanesport, and they’re about ready to make over their bank-accounts to him.  They like him, you know,—­a lot of folks do like just that kind of slippery snake.  It’s funny,—­you’d think anyone with ordinary common-sense would grab hold of his watch and his small change, and hang on to it—­hard, as soon as Br’er Snider hove in sight.  But no,—­they try to crowd their money onto him...  Real gold!  Of course it was real,—­that’s what fetched ’em.  They don’t stop to think that there’s no connection proved between the gold and the sea-water.  What got ’em interested at first was old man Chick’s reputation for honesty.  He is honest,—­no doubt about that, honest as the day is long.  Only he’s been fooled like the rest of ’em,—­he was over here two weeks ago, and they did their trick for him then, with the tin box and the battery, and the blue and white powders, and all the rest of it.  They gave him some of the gold they made then, and he carried it up to the city and had it analyzed.  But they could make gold in J. Harvey Bowditch’s tall hat just as well as in that old tin box.”

I had been thinking all the time he was speaking.

“Look here,” I said, “I saw them down under the wharf, yesterday afternoon.”

“You did?  Where?”

I told him all about it,—­how I had seen them both on the platform above the water, what they were doing, and how guilty they had acted.

“There’s a trap-door, then?  Do you suppose you can point it out to me?  Let’s stroll down there now.  Pretend to be talking about something else, and just cough when we are on the trap.”