He pulled the dog away, and entered the cavity, quite regardless now of rotten wood, bugs, and “thousand-legged worms.” His heels were still sticking out of the log, when his hand touched the broken end of a small trunk, and slid over a heap of coin, which had almost filled it, and run out in a little stream from the opening the dog had made.
Out came Jack again, covered with dirt, his hair tumbled over his eyes, and both hands full of half-dollars. He dashed back the stray locks with his sleeve, glanced eagerly at the coin, looked quickly around to see if there was any person in sight, then examined the contents of his hands.
“If there’s no owner to this money, I’m a rich man!” he said, with sparkling eyes. “There ain’t less than a thousand dollars in that trunk!”
To a lad in his circumstances, five-and-twenty years ago, such a sum might well appear prodigious. To Jack it was an immense fortune.
“And how can there be an owner?” he reasoned. “It must have been in that log a good many years,—long enough for the trunk to begin to rot, any way. Some fellow must have stolen it and hid it there; and he’d have been back after it long ago, if he hadn’t been dead,—or like enough he’s in prison somewhere. Here, Lion! keep out of that!” and Jack cuffed the dog’s ears, to enforce strict future obedience to that command. “Nobody must know of that log,” he muttered, looking cautiously all about him again, “till I can take the money away.”
But now, along with the sudden tide of his joy and hopes, a multitude of doubts rushed in upon his mind. How was he to keep his great discovery a secret until he should be ready to take advantage of it? The thief who had stolen the coin might be dead; but was it not the finder’s duty to seek out the real owner and restore it to him? Already that question began to disturb the boy’s conscience; but he soon forgot it in the consideration of others more immediately alarming.
“The thief may have been in prison, and he may come back this very night to find his booty! Or the owner of the land may claim it, because it was found on his premises.” And Jack remembered with no little anxiety that the land belonged to Mr. Chatford’s neighbor, the stern and grasping Squire Peternot. “Or, after all,” he thought, “it may be counterfeit!”
That was the most unpleasant conjecture of any. “I’ll find out about that, the first thing,” said Jack; and he determined to keep his discovery in the meanwhile a profound secret.
Accordingly, after due deliberation, he crept back into the log, and replaced the piece of the trunk, with the handle, and all the coin except one half-dollar; then, having partially stopped the opening with broken sticks and branches, he started for home.