Native spies in the employ of the old company lurked about the camp at all hours; tools were stolen, or rendered worthless, at every opportunity, and boats were set adrift, or had holes bored in their bottoms during the night.
At length Gerald Hamer asked Phil and Serge if they would get what sleep they could in the daytime, and act as camp-guards at night. “I feel that I can trust you two implicitly,” he said.
They willingly agreed to do this, and on that very night, while they were patrolling opposite sides of the camp, Serge sprang upon a skulking figure who, by a violent effort, wrenched himself free and escaped, leaving only a broken watch-chain in the lad’s hand. To his unbounded amazement, when he and Phil examined this trophy by lantern-light, he found attached to it, as a charm, the identical bit of carved ivory that he had given to his comrade in New London, and which the latter had lost so long ago.
“The fur-seal’s tooth!” he cried, almost doubting the evidence of his eyes.
“It certainly is!” exclaimed Phil, as he examined it curiously.
“There must be magic in it, or how could it possibly have come here?” added Serge.
“Let me have that bit of chain and the rest of those charms, and I’ll find out what magic there is about it,” said Phil, mysteriously.
Serge gave them to him, and on the following day Phil went, for the first time, to the company’s store in the trading-post.
“Do you know to whom these belong?” he asked of the first man he met, at the same time displaying the trophy captured the night before.
“Why, yes,” answered the man, examining them closely. “They belong to that fellow over there.”
Turning in the direction indicated, Phil beheld the man who, he believed, had injured him more than any one else in the world――Simon Goldollar.
“You scoundrel!” shouted Phil, springing to where Goldollar was seated at a desk, and standing squarely in front of him. “How dare you show your thief’s face among honest men?”
“Oh, it is you, is it?” retorted the other, coolly, staring at Phil from head to foot. “What are you doing here, where you have no business and are not wanted, and what do you mean by calling me a thief?”
“I mean what I say. Didn’t you steal this from me?” Here Phil produced the fur-seal’s tooth.