de me very happy, Homer," Auntie Sue returned. "But are you
sure you can fix it about that reward? The man who is coming to claim it
will make trouble, won't he, if he is not paid, somehow?"

"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 w