Half an hour later, Don’s pony came home riderless. The hostler told the general that he came from toward the landing, and that he had seen Clarence going that way a short time before. Upon hearing this, the general set out at once for Rochdale, where he learned from some of the hangers-on that his nephew had been seen to board the Emma Deane, and as he had not come off again he must have gone up the river on her. This being the case, there was nothing to be done now but to communicate with his father and await developments.
A few weeks cleared up everything. Clarence had reached his father’s house in safety, and the same letter that brought the information, contained also a sum of money sufficient to defray Marshall’s expenses to his home. The boy seemed glad to go, and his cousins rarely heard from him afterward.
And what did the general say to Don? Not a word. The latter limped about the house for nearly a week before he was able to sit in the saddle again, and his father wisely concluded that if his night’s experience in the cellar had not cured him of his love of practical joking, nothing that he could say would help the matter any. Of course, both the boys were eager to learn the truth concerning the buried treasure, and as soon as Marshall went away, they spoke to their parents about it. Then it came out that either old Jordan had wilfully misrepresented things, which was probable, or else that Godfrey’s lively imagination and his great desire to be rich without labor, had led him to magnify the contents of the barrel, which was still more probable. The old negro had certainly buried a barrel on the morning the levee was cut, and it contained silver-ware that, in good times, could have been bought for a thousand or fifteen hundred dollars. The barrel was dug up by another negro as soon as the soldiers were gone, and the most of the silver-ware was in use now, and had been ever since the war. The general thought this a good place to say something the boys would remember. People do sometimes get rich without labor, he said, but their wealth does not, as a rule, last long. To learn the value of money, one must work for it. There is but one sure way to become prosperous, and that is to be industrious, saving and honest. Had Godfrey remembered this, he might have been living at home, a happy and contented man, instead of hiding in the swamp for fear of arrest. The general never thought of having him arrested, and would not have said a word to him if he had met him in the road; but Godfrey knew something that the general didn’t know: he had been guilty of highway robbery, and he thought it best to keep out of sight. Of course, he went on from bad to worse—one always does, unless he grows better every day—and the people in the neighborhood often heard of him after that. Perhaps we also shall hear of him, and of some of our other characters, in the second volume of this series, which will be entitled, The Boy Trapper.
THE END.
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