Bumpus looked around at his seven chums, and grinned.
“Well, to think that I’d find that lost package after all; and had it along with me all the time, but didn’t know it,” he went on to say, as though this struck him as the most remarkable part of the whole affair.
“But we knew it, all the same,” avowed Davy; “and after you’ve loaded that suit with a stone, and sunk five feet deep, perhaps we’ll accept you again as a member in good standing. But you sure are the most stubborn fellow that ever lived.”
“Anyway, my mind’s relieved of a load,” affirmed Bumpus, composedly; “because I know now what I did with that lost package.”
He soon made the change, and then some of the boys went with him to see that he buried the strong smelling garments where they would never come back again; which ceremony was conducted with all manner of laughter and boyish jokes.
True to his promise Step Hen did manage to secure that musket which the cunning Jasper had used in constructing his man-trap; and spent an hour extracting the load from the rusty barrel. He confessed himself very much disappointed, however, because, after all, it proved to contain only a single bullet instead of the handful of missiles that he had prophesied would be found packed away there. But he took the old weapon away with him, and declared he would hang it from the wall in his den at home, to remind him of other days.
In New Orleans Thad easily procured all the further evidence needed to prove that the girl whom he had found with Jasper was really his own true little sister Pauline; and when the scouts once more reached Cranford there was quite a furore in the town over the successful outcome of the boys’ trip South.
Thad had even asked the sheriff about the escaped black convicts said to be hiding in Alligator Swamp, and whom he expected to round up with his posse after placing Jasper in a place of security; and when Giraffe and the rest heard that there was really a fellow who was minus the third finger of his left hand, they gave the patrol leader great credit for reading the signs of the trail aright.
Having accomplished the one important mission that had taken them down into Dixie, and successfully navigated the numerous perilous channels upon which their boats had embarked, it should not be necessary for us to accompany the Silver Fox Patrol any further in these pages; but we shall surely hope and expect to meet with Thad Brewster and his chums again at some time in the near future; for such wide-awake and enterprising scouts must of necessity constantly encounter new and interesting adventures which would be worth while telling. Until that time arrives, then, we will ring down the curtain, and say good-bye.
THE END.