Don’s experiment 231 CHAPTER XV. A joke that was no joke 248 CHAPTER XVI. Conclusion 268 THE BURIED TREASURE. CHAPTER I. GODFREY EVANS. “Wal, of all the dinners that ever a white man sot down to, this yere is the beat!” The speaker was Godfrey Evans--a tall, raw-boned man, dressed in a tattered, brown jean suit. He was barefooted, his toil-hardened hands and weather-beaten face were sadly soiled and begrimed, and his hair and whiskers looked as though they had never been made acquainted with a comb. As he spoke he drew an empty nail-keg from its corner, placed a board over the top of it, and seating himself, ran his eye over the slender stock of viands his wife had just placed on the table. The man’s appearance was in strict keeping with his surroundings. The cabin in which he lived and everything it contained told of the most abject poverty. The building, which was made of rough, unhewn logs, could boast of but one room and a loft, to which access was gained by a ladder fastened against the wall. It had no floor and no windows, all the light being admitted through a dilapidated door, which every gust of wind threatened to shake from its hinges, and the warmth being supplied by an immense fire-place with a stick chimney, which occupied nearly the whole of one end of the cabin. There were no chairs to be seen--the places of these useful articles being supplied by empty nail-kegs and blocks of wood; and neither were there any beds--a miserable “shake-down” in one corner being the best in this line that the cabin could afford. Everything looked as if it were about to fall to pieces. Even the rough board table on which the dinner was placed would have tumbled over, had it not been propped up against the wall. Godfrey Evans had seen better days. He had once been comparatively well off in the world; but he had lost all his property through no fault of his own, and the loss so disheartened him that he would make no effort to accumulate more. At his time of life it was too late to begin again with empty hands, he said; so he accepted the situation, but with a very bad grace, and spent the most of his time in roaming about the woods with his gun on his shoulder, and the rest in bemoaning his altered circumstances, and denouncing those of his neighbors who were more fortunate than himself.