"Will you let me see the hundred dollars they gave you?" asked the young engineer. "Certainly," replied Glen, with an air of surprise, and adding, rather stiffly, "though I didn't think, Billy, that _you_ would require proof of my truthfulness." "I don't, my dear boy, I don't!" exclaimed Billy Brackett. "I would believe your unsupported word quicker than the sworn statement of most men. I want to look at that money for a very different purpose." So a roll of brand-new bills was handed to him, and he examined them one by one with the utmost care. "There are two hundred dollars here," he said at length. "Is this Binney's share of the reward as well as your own?" "No. I had a hundred-dollar bill, and Mr. Caspar seeing it, asked if I would mind taking small bills for it, as he wanted one of that amount to send off by mail; so, of course, I let him have it." "Oh, my children! my children!" murmured Billy Brackett, "why will you persist in attempting to travel through this wicked world without a guardian? Of all the scrapes from which I have been called to rescue you, this might have proved the most serious." "I don't see how," said both Glen and Binney. Winn knew, and he smiled a little self-complacent smile as he reflected, "This is a little worse than any mess I ever got into." "You would have seen quickly enough if you had tried to spend this money," said Billy Brackett, "for you would undoubtedly have been arrested on the charge of counterfeiting. Those same fellows put Winn here in that fix a short time since, besides getting away with a thousand dollars' worth of wheat that he had in charge, and now they have come very near serving you the same trick." Here Winn's smile faded away rather suddenly, while Glen exclaimed, "Do you mean to say that these bills are counterfeit?" "I do," replied Billy Brackett; "and if you doubt it, take them to the first bank you come across and ask the cashier." "But the City Marshal took some just like them," argued Glen, catching at the only straw of hope in sight. "So much the worse for the City Marshal, and I for one shall let him suffer the consequences. He had no business to accept a reward for performing a simple act of duty, in the first place; and in the second, the readiness with which he delivered this raft to the first claimants who came along makes it look very much as though he could be bribed." "Well," said Glen, in a despairing tone, "if what you say is true, and I know it must be, we are in a fix. That hundred dollars was to pay our expenses to New Orleans; now I don't know how we shall get there." "New Orleans! Are you bound for New Orleans?"