After the straightforward story of Tom Zachary, which explained the cunning method by which Lieutenant Coleman and his comrades had been deceived by the flag-messages, the soldiers could feel no resentment toward Tom. They were so happy in the possession of all the good news they had heard that they would have shaken hands with Bud Bryson himself, if he had been one of their rescuers.

"Now I reckon," said the rosy-faced man, as he got on his feet to go down the mountain, "considerin\' the way things has turned out, you-all won\'t keer about investin\' in property in this upper kentry, and I\'ll give ye back your money," he continued, looking fondly at the two yellow coins.

Coleman and Bromley, however, insisted that a bargain was a bargain, and that they wanted the land more than ever. They should go away, they said, the next day if Philip was able to make the journey; and Lieutenant Coleman pressed another coin upon Hooper, for which he was to bring them a supply of clothing which they could wear as far as Asheville.

It all seemed like a dream to the three belated soldiers when their visitors had gone; but Bromley, who was the more practical, reminded his comrades that the antislavery societies must have been long since disbanded, and that the gold was theirs by the right of discovery. So, after making a supper of the corn-bread from the haversack, Coleman and Bromley fell to work with a will, stripping the mill of its golden bands and hinges and hasps; and late into the night the windows of the forge glowed and beamed, and the ruddy firelight streamed out through the cracks in the logs, where Bromley, the goldsmith, was smelting and hammering the precious metal into bars, and beating into each, while it was soft, the impress of a double-eagle, reversed.

When all the gold was packed in the very cask in which they had found it, and so wedged and padded with leaves of the temperance books that it no longer chinked when it was moved, a book-cover was nailed on the head, and the package was addressed to "LIEUTENANT FREDERICK HENRY COLEMAN, U.S.A., WASHINGTON, D.C."

The tin box containing the diary, and the flags and swords and such books as they wished to keep, were gathered together and packed for transportation.

By noon of the following day the two mountaineers appeared again, looking like old-clothes men as they came over the hill.

When the three soldiers got out of their tattered clothing, and into the butternut-and-gray suits which had been borrowed for them from the neighbor folk in the settlement, the misfits were such that they looked hardly less comical than before. Philip was the first to appear from the house ready for the descent. His hat was a bell-crowned beaver, his trousers were turned up half-way to his knees, and he carried in his hand the alligator-skin bag which had belonged to the beautiful lady of the balloon.

"THEY LOOKED HARDLY LESS COMICAL THAN BEFORE."
"THEY LOOKED HARDLY LESS COMICAL THAN BEFORE."

After they got down the ladders, Coleman carried the cask as far as the gorge, resting at intervals, but never permitting the two mountaineers to test its weight or even suspect its contents. Philip and Bromley divided between them the flags and sabers, the remaining carbine, the map, and the tin box containing the diary. Hooper and Zachary were occupied with the six sad roosters, and Tumbler, the bear, ambled along behind the men as they picked their way down the mountain. It was really a perilous journey along the rough trunk of the great pine which lay across the dark chasm, but Bromley shouldered the cask, and walked over as steadily as old Tumbler himself, and, arrived on the opposite side, he set it on end in the tail of the steer-cart, which was hitched to a sapling alongside the very rock on which Andy, the guide, had been seated when he told the story of the old man of the mountain.

The tall pines were whispering together in the soft wind as unconcernedly as if it had been seven days instead of seven years since the soldiers had stood on that spot before, and the tinkling stream below was still chinking on its way like silver coins in a vault.

At first Philip mounted the seat beside Tom Zachary, and took charge of the fowls jolting in a yellow, croaking mass between his feet, except the old paralyzed rooster, which he earned tenderly in his lap. He was too excited to ride, however, and presently he got down and walked with the others. At every stage of the descent the soldiers were learning new facts about the war, which made their return to the United States a triumphal and delirious progress. By the time they reached the hill-pastures where they were greeted by some of the very same copper bells that had startled the cavalcade going up, they began to be joined by the people who had heard of their discovery. They came in twos, and threes, and whole families, to swell their train, so that when they turned into the sandy road through the valley they were attended by a joyous procession of curious followers, which steadily increased until the cart, with the bear shambling alongside, came to a stand by the woodpile of Elder Long, misnamed Shifless. Philip took off his bell-crowned hat right and left to the women; and Lieutenant Coleman greeted Aunt Lucy, who leaned on her crutches at the gate among the purple cabbage-heads, with the stately courtesy he had learned at West Point.

Riley Hooper m............