“Gentlemen,”—and my grandfather turned with a quaint touch of humor, and a merry twinkle in his bright old eyes—“gentlemen, behold the treasury! It has proved a better hiding-place than I ever imagined it would. There’s not much here, Jack, but enough to keep you going for a while.”

We were all staring, and the old gentleman was unfeignedly enjoying our mystification. It was an hour on which he had evidently counted much; it was the triumph of his resurrection and homecoming, and he chuckled as he twirled the knob in the steel door. Then Bates stepped forward and helped him pull the door open, disclosing a narrow steel chest, upright and held in place by heavy bolts clamped in the stone of the chimney. It was filled with packets of papers placed on shelves, and tied neatly with tape.

“Jack,” said my grandfather, shaking his head, “you wouldn’t be an architect, and you’re not much of an engineer either, or you’d have seen that that paneling was heavier than was necessary. There’s two hundred thousand dollars in first-rate securities—I vouch for them! Bates and I put them there just before I went to Vermont to die.”

“I’ve sounded those panels a dozen times,” I protested.

“Of course you have,” said my grandfather, “but solid steel behind wood is safe. I tested it carefully before I left.”

He laughed and clapped his knees, and I laughed with him.

“But you found the Door of Bewilderment and Pickering’s notes, and that’s something.”

“No; I didn’t even find that. Donovan deserves the credit. But how did you ever come to build that tunnel, if you don’t mind telling me?”

He laughed gleefully.

“That was originally a trench for natural-gas pipes. There was once a large pumping-station on the site of this house, with a big trunk main running off across country to supply the towns west of here. The gas was exhausted, and the pipes were taken up before I began to build. I should never have thought of that tunnel in the world if the trench hadn’t suggested it. I merely deepened and widened it a little and plastered it with cheap cement as far as the chapel, and that little room there where I put Pickering’s notes had once been the cellar of a house built for the superintendent of the gas plant. I had never any idea that I should use that passage as a means of getting into my own house, but Marian met me at the station, told me that there was trouble here, and came with me through the chapel into the cellar, and through the hidden stairway that winds around the chimney from that room where we keep the candlesticks.”

“But who was the ghost?” I demanded, “if you were really alive and in Egypt?”

Bates laughed now.