“See here, Ed, I want to talk to you. You fellows have made a tremendous strike, for of course there’s no use in disguising the truth any longer, to you at least, or pretending to be what I have tried to appear. You’ve got your man and you’ve got the proofs dead to rights. You’ve found me with the swag in my possession. If you turn me over to the law, I’ll go up for ten or twenty years to a certainty. There is no use in defending myself. The case is too clear, too complete. Do you see?” “Certainly” responded Ed. “You must pay the penalty of your crime. We have no personal hard feeling against you, Jim, except that you ought not to have tried to involve us boys as you have done, and--” “Well, you see, Ed,” interrupted the bound man, “I was desperate. There was a big price on my head, and hundreds of men were looking for me everywhere. On the one hand, a prison stared me in the face, on the other was freedom with abundant wealth to enjoy it with. If I could get down the river, I thought I should have everything snug and right. I didn’t mean to get you boys into any trouble--really and truly I didn’t, Ed. My plan was to blunder into that chute, and while you fellows were all scared half to death about it, to slip ashore. I had those men on the bank just for safety’s sake. They don’t really know anything about me or what I’ve got--what I did have,” he corrected, with sudden recollection that his carpet-bag was no longer in his possession. “Those men were hired by my partners to have horses there and run me off into Mississippi, and I was to give them a hundred or two for the job, besides paying for the horses we might ride to death. Really and truly, Ed, that’s all there was of that.” “I see no particular reason to doubt your statement, Jim,” replied the boy. “But what of it?” “Well, you see, I want to talk business with you, Ed, and I wanted you to know, in the first place, that I hadn’t tried to harm you boys in any way--at least, till I was caught in a trap by that sharp brother of yours.” There was a distinct touch of malignity in the man’s tone as he mentioned Phil, to whom he justly attributed his capture. “Never mind that,” he resumed after a moment. “I want to talk business with you, as I said. Here are you five boys, all alone on the river. Anything might happen to a flatboat. You’re likely to make, as nearly as I can figure it out from your talk, about fifty or a hundred or at most a hundred and fifty dollars apiece out of the trip, after paying steamboat passage back. Now you’ve caught me. If you surrender me--” “Which of course we shall,” broke in Ed, in astonishment. “As I was saying” continued Jim, “if you surrender me, you’ll probably get the reward offered, though that’s never quite certain.”