"They carried you far away, treated you well, and took you to a farm in the West, where one day I found you, and you told me your story and I immediately recognized you as a boy stolen years ago, and whose photograph I had often seen published in the papers.
"Your father, Mr. Rossmore, is a very rich man, and he has offered fifty thousand dollars for your return, and I will get it.
"Now, my boy, I wish you to study these photographs of your old home, and here is the name of the servants who were at the house then, and your nurse was an old coloured woman, Auntie Peggy.
"These are the clothes you had on when you were stolen; they are ragged now, for you wore them a long time, and when you got others you kept these. You had this ring on your forefinger then, but you can wear it now on your left hand little finger—see, it just fits."
"What has become of the real little boy that was stolen?" asked Will, quietly.
The men all exchanged peculiar glances with each other, and one said: "Tell him, Jerry, so that he'll know we won't stand any nonsense."
"Well, he would not behave as we wished him to, and he would remember too much, and so we dared not take him back to get the reward, you see."
"And is he dead?"
"You've hit it, he is, for one day he left our camp, as we were crossing the prairie in Nebraska, not very many miles from Fort McPherson, and we found him lying under a solitary tree, mighty near dead from starvation; and he died, and we buried him there, cutting his name into the tree, as a monument, as any emigrant folks would who had lost a young one.