Ah, Rosamond, calling in vain! Give it up, old soldier! No battle-cry of honor can rally comrades like this. But they pressed perilously close to the edge of the cliff—the blind man and the little child—beginning to sob together with dreary helplessness and futility, and casting their hopeless entreaties upon the night air, the echoes joining their pleas with wild insistence, and the forest silence holding its breath that no wistful word might be lost. And thus others found them, shadowy figures as stealthily approaching as if the blind man could see, and the confiding little child wonder;—two, three, four, five figures pausing on the summit of the cliff, watching in intensest excitement the man on the ledge, and, slowly emerging from the cavity, dragging after him an iron box twelve inches square perhaps and weighty to handle, a boy, slight, agile, unmistakable. Skimpy, covered with dust, choking, out of breath, confused by the sound of voices on the summit and the clamor of the echoes, hardly knew how it was that he should hear in the medley the familiar tones of his father calling on Heaven to pity him, for his son was a thief! He heard too the voice of the child and the blind soldier’s entreaties. And then the sharp tones of the constable rang out—“Surrender thar—or I fire!” His senses reeled as Binwell, catching the box from his hands, turned and with quick leaps like a fox’s clambered on down the ledges. The cord was still about Skimpy’s shoulders; with a sharp twist he came to his knees in great pain; then the end of the rope swung slack below, and he knew that Binwell had just cut it to liberate himself—a great splash in the river told that he had taken to the water and the constable’s bullet whizzed by the Bluffs a second too late. “He’ll hev ter gin up the box time I light out arter him,” cried the constable; “I’ll meet up with him by the ruver-bank. He can’t run fur with a heavy box full o’ gold an’ silver.” There was no use in keeping the secret longer. “It’s full o’ sand!” cried the blind man with dreary contempt in the fact. “The Squair kerried it full o’ sand whenst he buried it—jes’ fur a blind. He knowed Jerry s’picioned he hed money an’ he never trested him. Jerry kep’ watch, an’ I clomb the Bluffs, an’ hid the box. Whar the Squair an’ me actially hid the money war in a hollow o’ one o’ the logs o’ his house, an’ thar’s whar the money war kep’ till the e-end o’ the war. The heirs knowed it all the time. Write ter Arkansas an’ ax the one ez be livin’ thar.”