"Suppose you were to find that your father was alive, and had searched everywhere for _you_, and that he thought of nothing but you, and was all the time hoping for your return--that he had grown old before his time, all because of his longing and sorrow for you?" The thief dropped his eyes, then his face twitched; at last he burst out crying. "Your father _is_ alive; he isn't far from this cabin; he's very sick; I've just left him. Nothing but the sight of you will do him any good; but I think so much of him that I'd rather kill you this instant than let him know what business you've been in."

"Them's my sentiments, too," remarked the sheriff.

"Let me see him!" exclaimed the prisoner, clasping and raising his manacled hands, while his face filled with an earnestness which was literally terrible--"let me see him, if it's only for a few minutes! You needn't be afraid that _I'll_ tell him what I am, and _you_ won't be mean enough to do it, if I don't try to run away. Have mercy on me! You don't know what it is to never have had anybody to love you, and then suddenly to find that there _is_ some one that wants you!"

The preacher turned to the officer and said:

"I'm a law-abiding citizen, sheriff."

And the sheriff replied:

"He's _your_ pris'ner."

"Then suppose I let him go, on his promise to stick to his father for the rest of his life!"

"He's your pris'ner," repeated the sheriff.

"Suppose, then, I were to insist upon your taking him into custody."

"Why, then," said the sheriff, speaking like a man in the depths of meditation, "I would let him go myself, and--and I'd have to shoot _you_ to save my reputation as a faithful officer."

The preacher made a peculiar face. The prisoner exclaimed:

"Hurry, you brutes!"

The preacher said, at last:

"Let him loose."

The sheriff removed the handcuffs, dived into his own pocket, brought out a pocket-comb and glass, and handed them to the thief; then he placed the lantern in front of him, and said:

"Fix yourself up a little. Your hat's a miz'able one--I'll swap with you. You've got to make up some cock-and-bull story now, for the old man'll want to know everything. You might say you'd been a sheriff down South somewhere since you got away from the feller that owned you."

The preacher paused over a knot in one of the cords on the prisoner's legs, and said:

"Say you were a circuit-rider--that's more near the literal truth."

The sheriff seemed to demur somewhat, and he said, at length:

"Without meanin' any disrespect, parson, don't you think 'twould tickle the old man and the citizens more to think he'd been a sheriff? They wouldn't dare to ask him so many questions then, either. And it might be onhandy for him if he was asked to preach, while a smart horse-thief has naturally got some of the p'ints of a real sheriff about him."

"You insist upon it that he's my prisoner," said the preacher, tugging away at his knot, "and I insist upon the circuit-rider story. And,"

continued the young man, with one mighty pull at the knot, "he's _got_ to be a circuit-rider, and I'm going to make one of him. Do you hear that, young man? I'm the man that's setting you free and giving you to your father!"

"You can make anything you please out of me," said the prisoner. "Only hurry!"

"As you say, parson," remarked the sheriff, with admirable meekness; "he's _your_ prisoner, but I _could_ make a splendid deputy out of him if you'd let him take my advice. And I'd agree to work for his nomination for my place when my term runs out. Think of what he might get to be!--there _has_ sheriffs gone to the Legislature, and I've heard of one that went to Congress."

"Circuit-riders get higher than that, sometimes," said the preacher, leading his prisoner toward old Wardelow's cabin; "they get as high as heaven!"

"Oh!" remarked the sheriff, and gave up the contest.

Both men accompanied the prisoner toward his father's house. The preacher began to deliver some cautionary remarks, but the young man burst from him, threw open the door, and shouted:

"Father!"

The old man started from his bed, shaded his eyes, and exclaimed:

"Stevie!"

The father and son embraced, seeing which the sheriff proved that even sheriffs are human by snatching the circuit-rider in his arms and giving him a mighty hug.

The father recovered and lived happily. The son and the preacher fulfilled their respective promises, and the sheriff, always, on meeting either of them, so abounded in genial winks and effusive handshakings, that he nearly lost his next election by being suspected of having become religious himself.

[Illustration]

TOM CHAFFLIN'S LUCK.

"Luck? Why, I never seed anything like it! Yer might give him the sweepin's of a saloon to wash, an' he'd pan out a nugget ev'ry time--do it ez shure as shootin'!"

This rather emphatic speech proceeded one day from the lips of Cairo Jake, an industrious washer of the golden sands of California; but it was evident to all intelligent observers that even language so strong as to seem almost figurative did not fully express Cairo Jake's conviction, for he shook his head so positively that his hat fell off into the stream, which found a level only an inch or two below Jacob's boottops, and he stamped his right foot so vigorously as to endanger his equilibrium.

"Well," sighed a discontented miner from New Jersey, "Providence knows His own bizness best, I s'pose; but I could have found him a feller that could have made a darn sight better use of his good luck--ef he'd had any--than Tom Chafflin. _He_ don't know nothin' 'bout the worth of money--never seed him drunk in my life, an' he don't seem to get no fun out of keerds."

"Providence'll hev a season's job a-satisfyin' _you_, old Redbank,"

replied Cairo Jake; "but it's all-fired queer, for all that. Ef a feller could only learn how he done it, 'twouldn't seem so funny; but he don't seem to have no way in p'tickler about him that a feller ken find out."

"Fact," said Redbank, with a solemn groan. "I've studied his face--why, ef I'd studied half ez hard at school I'd be a president, or missionary, or somethin' now--but I don't make it out. Once I 'llowed 'twas cos he didn't keer, an' was kind o' reckless--sort o' went it blind. So I tried it on a-playin' monte."

"Well, how did it work?" asked the gentleman from Cairo.

"Work?" echoed the Jerseyman, with the air of an unsuccessful candidate musing over the "saddest words of thought or pen;" "I started with thirteen ounces, an' in twenty minutes I was borryin' the price of a drink from the dealer. _That's_ how it worked."

Certain other miners looked sorrowful; it was evident that they, too, had been reckless, and had trusted to luck, and that in a place where gold-digging and gambling were the only two means of proving the correctness of their theory, it was not difficult to imagine by which one they were disappointed.

"Long an' short of it's jest this," resumed Cairo Jake, straightening himself for a moment, and picking some coarse gravel from his pan, "Tom Chafflin's always in luck. His claim pays better'n anybody else's; he always gets the lucky number at a raffle, his shovel don't never break, an' his chimbly ain't always catchin' a-fire. He's gone down to 'Frisco now, an' I'll bet a dozen ounces that jest cos he's aboard, the old boat'll go down an' back without runnin' aground a solitary durned time."

No one took up Cairo Jake's bet, so that it was evident he uttered the general sentiment of the mining camp of Quicksilver Bar.

Every man, in the temporary silence which followed Jake's summary, again bent industriously over his pan, until the scene suggested an amateur water-cure establishment returning thanks for basins of gruel, when suddenly the whole line was startled into suspension of labor by the appearance of London George, who was waving his hat with one hand and a red silk handkerchief with the other, while with his left foot he was performing certain _pas_ not necessary to successful pedestrianism.

"Quicksilver Bar hain't up to snuff--oh, no! Ain't a-catchin' up with Frisco--not at all! Little Chestnut don't know how to run a saloon, an'