"I will."

"Do you know," said Clarence timidly, yet with a half-conscious smile,
"that I--I kinder bring luck?"

The man looked down upon him, and said gravely, but, as it struck
Clarence, with a new kind of gravity, "I believe you."

"Yes," said Clarence eagerly, as they walked along together, "I brought
luck to a man in Sacramento the other day." And he related with great
earnestness his experience in the gambling saloon. Not content with
that--the sealed fountains of his childish deep being broken up by
some mysterious sympathy--he spoke of his hospitable exploit with the
passengers at the wayside bar, of the finding of his Fortunatus purse
and his deposit at the bank. Whether that characteristic old-fashioned
reticence which had been such an important factor for good or ill in
his future had suddenly deserted him, or whether some extraordinary
prepossession in his companion had affected him, he did not know; but
by the time the pair had reached the hillside Flynn was in possession
of all the boy's history. On one point only was his reserve unshaken.
Conscious although he was of Jim Hooker's duplicity, he affected to
treat it as a comrade's joke.

They halted at last in the middle of an apparently fertile hillside.
Clarence shifted his shovel from his shoulders, unslung his pan, and
looked at Flynn. "Dig anywhere here, where you like," said his companion
carelessly, "and you'll be sure to find the color. Fill your pan with
the dirt, go to that sluice, and let the water run in on the top of the
pan--workin' it round so," he added, illustrating a rotary motion with
the vessel. "Keep doing that until all the soil is washed out of it, and