That one was Joe Morgan, who scarcely knew whether he stood on his head or his feet. Mr. Warren's confident assertions regarding the value of the property which he and his two friends had found in the robbers' hiding place had turned him completely upside down—at least, that was what he told himself. His share of the ten thousand dollars, if he ever got it (and his employer did not seem to have any misgivings on that point), would make a great change in his circumstances. It would put it in his power to obtain the schooling he wanted, and give his mother the good long rest of which everybody, except Silas and Dan, could see that she stood so much in need.
"But won't they be hopping mad when they hear of it?" Joe asked himself, over and over again. "And what would they have done with the things that are in that valise, if they had found them? The money they could have spent, of course; but they would not dare wear the watches and jewelry, and the papers they would have destroyed, and with them their only chance of putting in a claim for the reward. As things have turned out, mother will receive the most benefit from this morning's work, unless it be the county treasurer, who was unjustly accused of crookedness. He can thank Bob and Tom for that, and if I ever see him, I shall take pains to tell him so. If they had not played that joke on father and Dan, he might have remained under a cloud all his life."
The young game-warden was so fully occupied with these thoughts that he did not know what was going on around him, until Bob Emerson seized him by the arm and shook him out of his reverie.
"Isn't that so?" he demanded.
"Certainly; it's all true," replied Joe.
"It was a nice place, wasn't it?" continued Bob.
"Splendid," said Joe, who had no idea what particular place Bob was referring to.
But the latter did not notice his abstraction. He and Tom were telling Mr. Warren what a nice camp the robbers had made for themselves under the bluff, and dilating upon the amount of work they must have done in making so good a path through those dense thickets.
"In front of the cabin—that's the way we always speak of it, for it wasn't really a cave, you know—there was a cleared half-circle that was fully as large as your parlor," said Bob. "In this circle we saw a few battered cooking utensils, the smoking ashes of a camp-fire, and the ghost that frightened Dan Morgan so badly that he dared not carry the secret to bed with him. I said from the first that it was a man and not an animal that yelled at us when Tom and I came down that gorge day before yesterday, and I finally succeeded in making Tom think so, too; but he insisted that it wasn't an outlaw, but some one who took it into his head to play a trick on us, just for the fun of seeing us run. Not until Joe told us his story, and gave us his ideas regarding matters and things, did we know just what we would have to face if we went into that gorge."