Godfrey was too much interested in his own thoughts to carry the discussion any farther. He breathed easier when he felt the money in his fingers, and because he had no pocket that would hold it, he kept it in his hand, and stood around with the rest of the hangers-on, and saw the Emma Deane come up to the landing and deposit the passengers and cargo she had brought. Like the rest he wondered who the fashionably-dressed young gentlemen were who got into the general’s carriage and rode off with him; and he would have wondered still more had he been able to look far enough into the future to see that he, the ragged, worthless Godfrey Evans, would one day be the trusted companion of one of those spruce young fellows, and that he would be intimately connected with him in a certain piece of business which, when it became known, would set all the tongues in the country for miles around in motion. The general and his nephews drove off; the Emma Deane, as soon as her freight and passengers were landed, backed out into the stream and once more turned her head toward New Orleans; the people who had been brought to the landing by the sound of her whistle spent a few minutes in exchanging notes, and then began to disperse; and finally the street was entirely deserted except by a few of the most persistent loafers, who sat on the boxes in front of Silas Jones’s store, and whittled and chewed tobacco for want of a better way of passing the time. Among these was Godfrey, who sunned himself for an hour or two like a turtle on his log, and then, with a deep sigh of regret, shouldered his rifle and bent his steps toward the woods in which his hopeful son Dan had long ago disappeared.