“I embark on an adventure. I crave adventure, I seek it in far places and near, wherefore I come hither with my bold companions, a-hunting a chest of gold. Forthwith, I become an uncertified private accountant. What hideous degradation! I tell you, Saxe, I’m mighty sick of this job. I’d just as lief be assistant bookkeeper in a tannery.”
“Why tannery?” David inquired. He pushed the heap of papers aside, and lighted another cigarette, highly pleased with the diversion.
“Because a tannery happened to be the most disagreeable place I could think of at the moment,” was the simple explanation. “Smells, you know.”
“Yes, I know,” David admitted. His jagged nose wrinkled violently, as memory smote his olfactory nerves.
Saxe seized on a topic that promised some measure of distraction from his crowding thoughts:
“Myself, I don’t think much of this method.” He waved a hand contemptuously toward the litter of papers on the desk before them. “It seems to me that we’re just losing time in wading through all this trash. But what shall we do, instead? This is a part of the exhaustive search.”
Roy sprang up with an exclamation of impatience.
“No Christian gentleman, not even a miser, would concoct the diabolical idea of preserving a clue to his gold pots amid trash of this sort; besides, I have a presentiment.”
“Oh, a presentiment!” There was a note of scoffing in Saxe’s voice.
But David, in the years since their graduation, had journeyed with Roy through strange places, and so had come to know the whimsical nature intimately, with a consequent respect for some seemingly fantastic idiosyncracies. Now, he stared at his friend expectantly, with no hint of derision in the look.