Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III THE SPOTTED STONE The early morning saw me, so recently a candidate for suicide, striking up the dry bed of the San Mateo River from the spot where the murder had been done; my eyes peeled, as the saying is, for spotted stones; and hope once more alive in my breast. Indeed, I had withdrawn so far from absolute despair as to be in a whirlwind of school-boy spirits. My imagination had been wildly at work during the night upon the wallet and its contents.
Burn all the papers but It the crew-man had said.
It, then, if actual money, might be a bill of large denomination; but with that the imagination would not rest. A valuable patent had suggested itself, or a valuable principle to be patented; the location of a rich gold mine, or a coal mine. Something, anyhow, that was worth doing murder for. On the other hand, for a dampener, the reason that suffices one murderer is not sufficient to the next. Some men will kill for a few dirty dollars; some onlyfor many bright thousands; and some again if merely to put the final quietus upon the tongue of a nagging wife. I tried to hold my desires in check, and kept reiterating,
A couple of thousand will help ? just a couple of thousand. But they would not be so snubbed and, together with that ray of hope that had been rekindled in my breast, were ever dancing like mad among the millions. The ancient river-bed was thickly laid with stones and contained more than one that was spotted. Indeed, had every spotted stone that I turned over concealed a dollar bill, I must soon have lost interest in the crew-man’s wallet. I had, I think, pictured the particular stone wanted as greenish black, very thickly and regularly overlaid with white polka-dots, and flattish; yet it might be a white stone, spotted with black; or it …