“Why! How—”
“I found the gold!”
“Where?”
“It was in the heart of the pounding mill. I tipped it over, and it sort of clinked. I thumped it here and there until I found that the hole where they pounded the corn had a false bottom. I pried it up and there was the gold!”
“Confederate gold?”
“No, not Confederate gold, but Georgia and Carolina gold. There never was any Confederate gold. None ever was coined. I received a letter about that from the museum this morning. The Confederate States coined a few silver half-dollars. All the rest of their money was paper.”
For a moment the two girls sat in silent contemplation of their great good fortune and the joyous future that lay before them.
“There isn’t such a lot of gold,” Marion said at last. “Forty or fifty pieces, that’s all, but each piece is worth several times its value in gold, so there will be enough.”
“Quite enough,” murmured Florence contentedly. “And we shall have a school! Such a school!”
The schoolhouse was yet to be built. That this might be accomplished, grateful mountaineers sent their teams over the mountains for windows, doors, seats and hardware, while others, manning a small sawmill, got out the lumber. When the time came for beginning the construction, there was a “workin’.” Mountain folks came for miles around; men with hammers, axes and saws, women with pots and pans and all manner of good things to eat. Men worked, women cooked. They made a holiday of it, and before the sun went down that day the two room school building was two-thirds done.