“I am overjoyed to hear it,” said the boy.
“And she was overjoyed to get rid of it, for it has been nothing but a botheration to her ever since she drew it from the bank. Old Morris showed me where you and he buried it on the night you dug it out of the cellar wall, and I brought it to New Orleans and exchanged it for greenbacks at a premium that made me open my eyes. I am first officer of the Hyperion, and in partnership with her owners. I do not expect to have time to make more than two or three trips on her before the Mississippi is opened, and then I hope to come back here and run a trading boat on the river.”
“Where will I be while you are doing that?” inquired Marcy.
“At home with your mother, where all good boys ought to be. You will get not less than a dollar for your cotton,” said Jack, turning to Rodney, “perhaps a dollar ten, minus the freight——”
“You don’t mean it!” Rodney almost gasped; for Jack’s matter-of-fact way of speaking of the fortune that seemed about to drop into his father’s hands took his breath away.
“What’s the reason I don’t mean it? I hope you don’t imagine that I am going to let anyone speculate with your property!” exclaimed the sailor. “Whatever the market price is when your cotton is landed in New York, that you will get, less the freight the Hyperion will charge you for taking it there. The twenty-five cents I am authorized to offer you is business; what you will receive over and above that will be owing to kinship. Your father and mine were brothers. Now what shall we do with that man Lambert; send him North for a guerilla or what?”
“I am perfectly willing to buy him off,” said Mr. Gray. “I can afford to be liberal, for I really believe we would have lost our cotton if it hadn’t been for him and his ’phantom bushwhackers.’”
“I am afraid he’ll not let you buy him off for any reasonable sum,” said Rodney.
“You might try him the first chance you get and find out what he is willing to do,” suggested Jack. “Any way to get rid of him, so that he will not bushwhack the teamsters we shall send into the woods after the cotton.”
“I suppose you have a permit this time,” observed Rodney.