"I wasn't drowned," said the old man. "But who has been after my money?" He put down the cup he was just raising to his lips and went up to the hole in the floor to investigate it, chuckling as he did so.
Cynthy, reassured that it was really Jabez Jones in life exactly as he had ever been, described to him the scene that she and Cyril witnessed on their arrival at the house, which the old man heard with grunts of satisfaction.
"So Pete has begun to repent!" he said. "I'm glad of that. And see now, my money isn't here after all. I took it away to the bank at Menominee last fall, and when I got out of the river—for I was able to float in it until washed on shore miles away lower down—having some gold with me, I just went across country to Menominee to see if it was safe. Happening to read in a newspaper that I had been killed, and my house was haunted, I thought I'd stay away a bit and frighten my graceless son well, and let him seek the money in vain. You see, everyone thought I kept it hid in a hole somewhere, because I always talked against banks, saying they were the worst places in which a man could keep his money. But talking is one thing and doing's another." He returned to the table and drank his tea.
Mr. Morton shook his head sadly over the hardened old man, and as the lovers sat together in the chimney-corner, talking after tea, whilst Cyril gave Blackie its lump sugar, he tried to make him see that the love of money is a great evil, and that in his case it had led his son into sin. But the old man's mental state was a very dark and unenlightened one, and not much impression could be made.
CHAPTER XVIII.
THE MEETING IN THE FOREST.
All through the winter the lumberers work in the woods, from sunrise to sunset, making the forest resound with the strokes of their axes as they fell tree after tree in amazing quantities. Often they divide into bands of six or eight men, each company striving to outrival the other in the amount of work it gets through. At night they return to the great wooden shanty, in which they sleep in the bunks arranged on two tiers of wooden shelves all around the place. They eat salt pork and drink strong tea, and at night sit round the huge log fires, smoking and chewing tobacco, and sometimes singing and telling stories.
Men who are strong and used to physical exertion enjoy the work, and return to it again and again, for the wages are good, and the bold, free life out of doors is not without its charms. But Gerald Morton was not strong enough, or yet rough enough, for the labour and the company it entailed. The men perceived this, and did not like to work with him, in spite of his pleasant, cheery ways. They nicknamed him "the gentleman," and at last their foreman was obliged to admit that it would be well for him to go to some other sphere of labour.
"You're not adapted to this life, nor yet strong enough for it," he said to Gerald, "so you had better go."
Gerald was thinking of these words as he spent his last day in the woods at the lumbering. On the morrow he must again set out on the wearying search for work. He was no nearer finding a fortune than on the first day of his life in America, but he thanked God in his heart as he worked that he had found in those huge American forests that which was of more value than any earthly money. Through his head were ringing the words of an old, old Book, which he carried everywhere with him, at first because it was his mother's, and afterwards for its own sake:—