“Yes, I expect he would,” returned the president, thoughtfully. “And my directors might have something to say. And there are the Burns people and the Bankers' Association and all. Hum-m-m!” Homer T. Ward considered the matter a few moments, then he laughed. “I'll tell you what we will do, Auntie Sue; we will let Brian Kent pay the reward himself. That would be fair, wouldn't it?” Auntie Sue was sure that Brian would agree that it was a fair enough arrangement; but she did not see how it was to be managed. Then her old pupil explained that he would pay the reward-money to the man who was coming to claim it, and thus satisfy him, and that the bank would hold the amount as a part of the debt which Brian was expected to pay. Auntie Sue never knew that President Ward himself paid to the bank the full amount of the money stolen by Brian Kent in addition to the reward-money which he personally paid to Jap Taylor, in order to quiet him, and thus saved Brian from the publicity that surely would have followed any other course. It should also be said here that Judy's father never again appeared in the Ozarks; at least, not in the Elbow Rock neighborhood. It might be that Jap Taylor was shrewd enough to know that his reputation would not permit him to show any considerable sum of money, where he was known, without starting an investigation; and for men of his type investigations are never to be desired. Or it is not unlikely that the combination of money and the city proved the undoing of the moonshiner, and that he came to his legitimate and logical end among the dives and haunts of his kind, to which he would surely gravitate. CHAPTER XXIII. IN THE ELBOW ROCK RAPIDS. The day following that night of Brian Kent's uneasy wakefulness was a hard day for the man and the woman in the little log house by the river. For Brian, the morning dawned with a sense of impending disaster. He left his room while the sky was still gray behind the eastern mountains, and the mist that veiled the brightness of the hills seemed to hide in its ghostly depths legions of shadowy spirits that from his past had assembled to haunt him. The sombre aisles and caverns of the dimly lighted forest were peopled with shadowy memories of that life which he had hoped would never again for him awake. And the river swept through its gray world to the crashing turmoil at Elbow Rock like a thing doomed to seek forever in its own irresistible might the destruction of its ever-living self. As one moving in a world of dreams, he went about his morning's work. “Old Prince” whinnied his usual greeting, but received no answer. “Bess” met him at the barnyard gate, but he did not speak. The sun leaped above the mountain-tops, and the world was filled with the beauty of its golden glory. From tree and bush and swaying weed, from forest and pasture, and garden and willow-fringed river-bank, the birds voiced their happy greetings to the new day. But the man neither saw nor heard.