high price. His main personal responsibility in the matter was to be
of the passive kind. He was to undertake either by himself, or by a
trustworthy representative--to receive at a prearranged address, on
certain prearranged days in every year, a note from the Colonel, simply
stating the fact that he was a living man at that date. In the event
of the date passing over without the note being received, the Colonel's
silence might be taken as a sure token of the Colonel's death by murder.
In that case, and in no other, certain sealed instructions relating to
the disposal of the Diamond, and deposited with it, were to be opened,
and followed implicitly. If my father chose to accept this strange
charge, the Colonel's papers were at his disposal in return. That was
the letter."

"What did your father do, sir?" I asked.

"Do?" says Mr. Franklin. "I'll tell you what he did. He brought the
invaluable faculty, called common sense, to bear on the Colonel's
letter. The whole thing, he declared, was simply absurd. Somewhere in
his Indian wanderings, the Colonel had picked up with some wretched
crystal which he took for a diamond. As for the danger of his being
murdered, and the precautions devised to preserve his life and his piece
of crystal, this was the nineteenth century, and any man in his senses
had only to apply to the police. The Colonel had been a notorious
opium-eater for years past; and, if the only way of getting at the
valuable papers he possessed was by accepting a matter of opium as
a matter of fact, my father was quite willing to take the ridiculous
responsibility imposed on him--all the more readily that it involved no
trouble to himself. The Diamond and the sealed instructions went into
his banker's strong-room, and the Colonel's letters, periodically
reporting him a living man, were received and opened by our family