“Well, you have had a time of it!” said Bob, who pulled up a chair and seated himself beside me. “We have been to Austin twice, and Tom got a letter off to his uncle.”
“Good enough!” said I, feeling that a big load had been removed from my shoulders. “Tom, you and I will go to the States together.”
“Are you going, too?” exclaimed Bob. “Well, I am going, and that will make three. Elam, here, thinks he can’t go.”
In fact I hadn’t looked toward Elam, but I looked at him now, and his face was as long as you please. He didn’t like it when his friends were talking of going away and leaving him.
“And that isn’t all,” continued Bob. “You know that those soldiers who came by here before you left told us that the savages had made an attack on the paymaster, and made an attempt to secure the thirty-five thousand dollars which he was taking to pay off the garrison at Fort Worth. They tried to shoot the mules, and they got all of them except one, and he ran most all the way to Austin.”
“Didn’t they catch him?” I asked; and I felt that I was going to hear something thrilling. Bill’s men had spoken of this a time or two, and predicted that Tom’s luck would stand him well in hand if he was disposed to look for this mule, too, but somehow I didn’t pay much attention to them; but now I knew that Tom had had a finger in this also. That fellow just beat the world for finding things!
“Has Tom found it?” I continued, so amazed that I could hardly speak.
“Yes, sir! Tom has found it,” said Bob. “We heard about it when we were in Austin, but we had so many other things to think of that we hardly thought of it again; but on our way home we ran across the mule in a little grove of post-oaks.”
“Dead, was he?”
“As dead as a door-nail. But we found the specie all right, and we took it back to Austin, and gave it to a paymaster there. You see the paymaster that had charge of the money was killed in the fight. We told him that we wanted a thousand dollars for giving it up, and he said he would write on to Washington and see what they said about it.”