“So am I! Wouldn’t that astonish Uncle Peter? He is having a fit, poor man. He has almost determined to begin digging around the place here to try and unearth the treasure. Of course, that is foolishness because we always saw Grandpa Jim come in the house and, if he ever left his room at night, I knew it and was up like a flash for fear he was sick or something.”
“Of course! Colonel Hathaway was not the kind of man to dig holes and put money away. He may have concealed his property somewhere and it will turn up sooner or later. In the meantime, it will be mighty bad business to let it get out that we don’t know where the stuff is, for that might bring down on your place a swarm of treasure seekers who would prove very annoying to you.”
“Uncle Peter thinks he invested most of it in gold mines and he says he hopes to find papers relating to the transaction somewhere.”
“Well now, go on and tell me what you mean to do. You are going to have to make your living and I, for one, think it is a good thing. How are you going to make it?”
“Have you any suggestions?”
“Of course!” answered Josie laconically. “That’s what I’m here for, not just idle curiosity.”
Mary Louise laughed again and Aunt Sally, in the kitchen, stopped a minute from her eternal scrubbing—her only solace of late—and dropped a tear in her bucket of hot suds, but the tear was a kind of happy tear at hearing once more the sound of laughter from her darling young mistress.
“Listen ter that, Eben! That there li’l perliceman gal air in the settin’ room. She sho do cheer up our baby lamb.”
“Yes, an’ she done stirred up the fire too. I ain’t a sayin’ the coal air a gonter las’ out the month if’n we ain’t pow’ful ’ticular.”
“G’long, nigger! You all time talkin’ ’bout coal. If’n you don’t look sharp, when yo’ time comes, Peter’ll be a-sayin’ when you knocks on the pearly gates, ‘Go on down ter perdition, you Eben! You ain’t fit fer nothin’ but stokin’ nohow.’ You much better be makin’ hot, cheerful fires fer po’ li’l Miss Mary Louise than countin’ over yo’ lumps er coal. The Lord air a gonter pervide. He knows as well as anybody an’ better than mos’ that we-alls is quality folk an’ he ain’t a gonter let us go col’.”