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When the business of the visitors was made known to Rogers, he was delighted, for here was an opportunity to get into a good business, which would probably be infinitely more pleasant than teaching. So he gave up his school and came to Morristown, being under contract to the two gentlemen to do what he could to induce the spirits to reveal the place of the concealed treasure in Schooley’s Mountain. But as it would not do for a stranger to come into the town and hang out a sign, stating that he was a spirit raiser, it was necessary for Rogers to pretend that he had come on other business, and so he took charge of a small school outside of the town, but gave the greater part of his time to investigating the minds of the people of Morristown, in order that he might find out what he could do in the way of duping them; and in the words of the old writer, he found that this would be a good place for the “marvelous exhibitions which he was able to facilitate with the greatest alacrity.”

Of course, he was not at all willing to begin business with the support of only two persons, and the first thing he did was to gather together as many men as possible who really wished to be rich, and who were willing to be governed by him in regard to the way in which they should go about obtaining the vast hoard buried far away in the mountain. After a time he succeeded in getting together as many as forty men, who all thoroughly believed in his honesty and in his ability to take them out to Schooley’s Mountain, to call up the spirits who guarded the treasure, to induce them to turn it over to them, and then to vanish peaceably, without offering to molest or harm any one.

But it was a long time before Rogers was ready to lead his company on the great quest. There were many, many things that had to be done before they could start, and he soon found that he was not able to work out his great scheme alone; so he went back to Connecticut and got another schoolmaster, to whom he divulged his secret, and brought him to Morristown, and the two together went into the spirit business with great energy and enterprise. Night after night the company of treasure seekers met together, sometimes in a dark room, and sometimes out in the wild, lonely fields, close to black forests, and out of sight and hearing of human abodes.

Rogers was a chemist; and he frequently went out to one of these lonely meeting places in the afternoon and prepared a mine, which he exploded during the midnight meetings, and thus created a great wonder and terror among his followers. When they were indoors, there would be knockings and strange voices heard coming through the cracks; these voices proceeding from the other schoolmaster, who covered his mouth with what the writer of the pamphlet calls “a superficial machine,” probably a bit of tin with a hole in it, which so disguised his voice that it was not recognized.

When they were out of doors in the black night, they would sometimes see a ghost flit about under the trees at the edge of the woods; and the second schoolmaster, well wrapped up in a sheet, seems to have made as good a ghost as could have been found anywhere. There were many supernatural performances, and among them was a great act, in which each one of the members of the company lay flat on his face in the field with his eyes shut, holding in one outstretched hand a sheet of paper. This was done in the hope that the spirits would write their instructions on the paper. Mr. Rogers knelt down with the others and held his paper; but it was not a blank sheet like the others. When this performance was over, all the papers were shaken together, and then they were drawn out one by one; and judge of the surprise and awe of all present, when one of them would contain some writing,–generally in a beautiful hand, such as could only be expected from a supernatural being (or a schoolmaster),–which would be found to be instructions as to what must be done.