goes
out at all, until we became settled. Her mother, my grandmother, had
left me a heap of stock in the bank and mills of Cranford; and as it was
very unpleasant for my mother down this aways, after father went, she
had determined to locate up yondah."

"And does she know about you coming down here?" asked Thad,
suspiciously, as if he feared that the other might have deceived the
only parent he had left; this bringing a tragedy of the grim mountains
so close home to them had given the scout leader considerable of a
thrill, for after all, despite his courage and grit, Thad was only a
boy.

Bob drew himself up proudly, and his black eyes flashed.

"I would sooner cut off my right hand, suh, than deceive my mother," he
said. "And, so you may understand the whole thing, I must tell you what
a strange longin' I've been hugging to my heart these two years back. It
is this. What if, after all, my father was _not_ dead at the time his
men saw him fall; what if these moonshiners have kept him a prisoner
somewhere in these mountains all this while, meanin' to punish him
because he had given them all so much trouble!"

"That's a stunning shock you've given me, Bob," said Thad, drawing a
long breath; "but see here, is it just a wild wish to have it so; or
have you any reason to believe such a thing; any foundation for the
theory, in fact?"

"I'll tell you, suh," Bob went on, feverishly. "A man came to me one
day, and said he had been sent by one of the revenues who had been with
my father that sad time, to tell me what he had picked up in the
mountains. There were rumors going around that somewhere deep in the
mountains, at one of the secret Stills, the moonshiners kept a prisoner
at work. Some said it must be one of the revenue men who had
disappeared; and that the moonshiners were bent on making him work up
the mash, as a sort of punishment for having done them so much damage
when he was in the employ of the Government."

"I see; and of course you jumped to the conclusion that it might be your
own father, alive and well, though held a prisoner of the moonshiners?"

"Both my mother and myself believed there might be just a little chance
that way. She was in bad health, and put it all in my hands. We have
never said a word about it to anybody in Cranford. While I have been
going to school with the rest of the boys in Cranford, all the time I
was in correspondence with one of the Government revenue agents, and
paying him t