“But it belongs to the Gordons,” said David, not at all daunted by his father’s speech, “and you have no right to lay a finger on it.”
“Wal, you’ll see if I don’t lay two whole hands onto it if I can find it; an’ if I don’t find it, it won’t be kase I don’t do no diggin’, I bet ye. Jest think of it,” said Godfrey, growing animated over the prospect of so great and sudden wealth. “Here’s us been a livin’ like the pigs in the gutter all these years, when we might have been ridin’ our own hosses an’ growin’ fat off the best kind of grub! Eighty thousand dollars! Enough to fill a hul bar’l! Why, one day, in the good old times, when I was a talkin’ with the gen’ral, he says to me: ‘Godfrey, how much is you wuth?’ Wal, I didn’t know, kase I hadn’t never thought of it none; but I told him I had so many niggers, wuth so much a head; so many cow brutes; so many hoss an’ mule brutes; so much land; an’ so many pig brutes runnin’ in the swamp. The gen’ral he figures it up, an’ tells me I wus wuth nigh on to twelve or fifteen thousand dollars, most likely it was nigher fifteen nor twelve. I tell you I felt big arter that. I held my head up high, like a steer in the corn, an’ felt like axin’ every man I met did he know I wus wuth fifteen thousand dollars, an’ it all made with these yer two hands, too? But eighty thousand! Whew! Why didn’t I think of that bar’l long ago? I reckin I’ll go down to the landin’ an’ ax Silas Jones will he trust me fur some store tobacker. I can tell him that I’ll be able to buy his hul consarn out next week!”
As Godfrey said this he arose from his barrel, and, taking his rifle down from its place over the door, went out of the cabin followed by Dan, who also carried a rifle on his shoulder. David and his mother watched them in silence until they had passed down the road out of sight, and then turned and looked at each other.
“Is it true about the barrel?” asked the boy at length.
“I am sure I don’t know,” was his mother’s answer, “and for the sake of all concerned I hope it is not. It is true that all the gold and silver, and other valuables belonging to the Gordon family, were buried on the night the levee was cut, and it is equally true that Jordan buried some of it. He went down the Pass with the gunboats when they left, and has never been seen or heard of since. What has become of him, nobody knows; and whether he went without telling Mrs. Gordon where he had hidden the valuables, is a question that no one outside the general’s family is able to answer. It may be possible that he did, for such things have happened.”
“When and where?” asked David.
“Right here in this neighborhood. After the war was over, and the soldiers began to return, there came to this landing a man named Brown, who had been a sailor on one of the Union gunboats. He did not look like a person who had more money than he wanted, but he said he had, and that his object in coming here was to rent a plantation and go to raising cotton. As almost everybody was ready to sell or rent, several plantations were offered him, but the only one he would look at was Colonel Cisco’s—an old worn-out place that no one else would have as a gift. The widow—the colonel was killed in the army, you know—was glad to get the hundred dollars Mr. Brown offered her to bind the bargain, and let him have the place at once. He said he could do nothing until his partner came from Memphis with the mules, provisions and other things needed to carry on plantations; but he took possession of the house, and lived there two months all by himself. He was never seen during the daytime. He visited none of the neighbors, and didn’t seem to want to have anybody call on him; but people went all the same, and one day somebody found out that the flower-beds in the back yard, on which Mrs. Cisco had spent so much time, had all been dug up, and that there was a hole there that one could bury a house in. The man didn’t like it at all because it had been found out, and said he was digging a cellar. It was discovered afterward, however, that all this work had been done in the night, and that Mr. Brown never thought of putting a cellar there.”
“What did he intend to put there then?” asked David, when his mother paused.
“Nothing. He hoped to take something out; but he was taken sick, and that was the end of his scheme. He had such a hard time getting well, that when he was able to be about again, he made up his mind that he had seen enough of the South, and that he would go home at once and stay there. He wanted to do something for the people who had been so kind to him during his sickness, so he took the man who had done the most for him into his secret, and told him what had brought him there. In the first place he had no partner, no money—only just enough to pay his railroad and steamboat fare to the place where he wanted to go—and no intention of cultivating the plantation. There was money buried somewhere near the house—he wanted it, and this was the way he found out about it:
“Attached to the same gunboat to which Mr. Brown belonged was a negro, who had once been Colonel Cisco’s house servant. During the war the colonel’s family hid all their valuables in the ground, just as all our people did who had anything to hide, and this servant helped them bury money and silver, to the amount of thirty thousand dollars and over. After he ran away and got on the gunboat, he told about it, and boasted that when the war closed he would soon make a rich man of himself; but he was taken sick, and this Mr. Brown, who was the doctor’s steward, took care of him. Before he died he told the steward about the buried money, and described the place where it was hidden so accurately that Mr. Brown could have found it in the darkest of nights. That was what made him hire the Cisco plantation.”