“The gold is all here,” said he, as he ran his hand over the shining pieces, “but I see that some of them are wet. I don’t suppose you fellows had opportunity to steal any of them. And so Tom has run away? Dear me! but won’t he be sorry? If he comes to my house, I’ll shut the door in his face. I won’t have such an ingrate about.”
Every one supposed that General Mason was very angry at his nephew, as, indeed, he was, but in a week or two it became known that he had sent his overseer up and down the river to learn something of Tom’s whereabouts; but he came back and reported that he had followed him as far as Memphis, and there all traces of him had been lost. I tell you, I began to have some respect for Tom after that. He had only fifty dollars in his pocket that I knew anything about, and a boy that would start off with that amount of money and face the world had a good deal in him.
For a year nothing was heard of Tom Mason, and those who had business with the general noticed that he had got over a good deal of his “crankiness,” and that it was difficult to make him mad. Before that he used to fly off the handle without any cause whatever. Jerry Lamar was astonished at the general’s conduct, and well he might be. He and his father wanted to get off the place, for they did not want to live near a man who would accuse one of them of stealing five thousand dollars, but the general wouldn’t hear to it. He bought all their logs at good prices, and Jerry was in a fair way of making a man of himself. He began to pay more attention to General Mason, and often told us that he wished he had Tom where he could talk to him. He was certain that everything would be forgiven if Tom would only come back.
Another year passed without bringing any word from the runaway, and it finally got noised abroad in the settlement that he was dead. The old gentleman heard it, and he bent over a little at the shoulders and walked with a cane. It was plain that he loved Tom, and that nobody else could take his place. Six months more passed—Tom had now been gone two years and a half—when one morning I saw General Mason coming down the road faster than I had ever seen him ride before. He held an open letter in his hand, and beckoned me out to the bars. I had seldom seen a man so excited. He was laughing and crying, all at once, so that I could hardly understand him.
“That miserable Tom is alive and kicking,” said he. “Here’s a letter from him that tells me everything he has been through—six pages of it. You must answer it, for I won’t[won’t]. Write to him that if I had him here with a rawhide in my hand, I would make him shed tears to pay for all the agony he caused me, I bet you. Tell him, too, that everything has been forgotten and forgiven, and that if he will come back I will receive him with open arms. I’ll teach the young scamp to run away from me!”
I wrote to Tom that night, away in some little town in Texas, and in due time he came home. I tell you, it would have bothered anybody in that settlement to take the rawhide to him. He was immense; the climate of Texas seemed to have agreed with him. He had been—but it is a long story, and there isn’ place for it in this book. Besides, I must bid you good-bye as a story-teller, for I am through writing about Tom. I will turn my history of him over to a cowboy who was with him on the Plains and who knows all about him. He promises me that he will soon begin the narrative of his wanderings in a book to be called “Elam Storm the Wolfer; or, The Lost Nugget.”
THE END.
‘SOCIAL
‘SPIRITUAL
Studies in Human and Divine Inter-Relationship