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III.

The day after I had this talk with Old Jacob I was rather surprised by getting a telegram from my cousin Gregory Wilkinson, telling me that he was coming down to pay us a visit, and would be there that afternoon. I was not as much astonished as I would have been if the telegram had come from anybody else, because Gregory Wilkinson had a way of telegraphing that he was going to do things which nobody expected him to do, and I was used to it. Moreover, I had every reason for desiring to maintain very friendly relations with him. He had told me several times that he had made a will by which his large fortune was to be divided between me and a certain Asylum for the Relief and Education of Destitute Red Indian Children that he was very much interested in; and he had more than hinted that the asylum was not the legatee that was the more to be envied. This made me feel quite comfortable about the remote future, but it did not simplify the problem of living comfortably in the immediate present. My cousin was a very tough, wiry little man, barely turned of fifty. There was any quantity of life left in him–his father, who had been just such another, had lived till he was eighty-nine. There was not much of a chance, therefore, that either the asylum or I would receive anything from his estate for ever so long–and I may add I was very glad, for my part, that things were that way. Gregory Wilkinson was a first-rate fellow, for all his queerness and sudden ways, and I should have been sorry enough to have been his chief heir. One reason why I liked him so much was because he was so fond of Susan. When we were married–although he had not seen her then–he sent her forks, and he had lived up to those forks ever since.

Susan was rather flustered when I showed her the telegram; but she went to work with a will, and got the little spare room in order, and stewed some peaches and made some biscuits for supper. Susan’s biscuits were something extraordinary. Gregory Wilkinson came all right, and after supper–he said that it was the nicest supper he had eaten in a long while–she did the honors of the Swallow’s Nest in the pretty way that is her especial peculiarity. She showed him the cow-stable, with the cow in it, and the colored girl milking away in her usual vigorous fashion, the chickens, the garden, the peach-trees, and the nest under the eaves where the swallows had lived when we first came there. Then, as it grew dark, we sat on the little veranda while we smoked our cigars–that is, Gregory Wilkinson and I smoked: all that Susan did was to try to poke her finger through the rings which I blew towards her–and I told why we had come down there, and what a good start we had made towards finding my great-great-great-uncle’s buried money. And when I had got through, Susan told how, as soon as I had found it, we were going to Europe.

We neither of us thought that Gregory Wilkinson manifested as much enthusiasm in the matter as the circumstances of the case demanded; but then, as Susan pointed out to me, in her usual clear-headed way, it was not reasonable to expect a man with a fortune to be as eager to get one as a man without one would be.

“Very likely he’ll give us his share for finding it,” said Susan; “he don’t want it himself, and it would be dreadful to turn the heads of all those destitute red Indian children by leaving it to them.”

I should have mentioned earlier that, so far as we knew, my cousin and I were my great-great-great-uncle’s only surviving heirs. The family luck had not held out any especially strong temptations in the way of pleasant things to live for, and so the family gradually had died off. Whatever my search should bring to light, therefore, would be divided between us two.