This time I caught Major Tallahassee Tucker by his own confession, and I felt easier.  I asked him into the creek, so I could drown him if he happened to be a track-walker or caboose porter.  All the way up the mountain he driveled to me about asparagus on toast, a thing that his intelligence in life had skipped.

Up above I got his mind segregated from food and asked if he had raised the ransom.

“My dear sir,” says he, “I succeeded in negotiating a loan on thirty thousand dollars’ worth of the bonds of our railroad, and—­”

“Never mind just now, major,” says I.  “It’s all right, then.  Wait till after dinner, and we’ll settle the business.  All of you gentlemen,” I continues to the crowd, “are invited to stay to dinner.  We have mutually trusted one another, and the white flag is supposed to wave over the proceedings.”

“The correct idea,” says Caligula, who was standing by me.  “Two baggage-masters and a ticket-agent dropped out of a tree while you was below the last time.  Did the major man bring the money?”

“He says,” I answered, “that he succeeded in negotiating the loan.”

If any cooks ever earned ten thousand dollars in twelve hours, me and Caligula did that day.  At six o’clock we spread the top of the mountain with as fine a dinner as the personnel of any railroad ever engulfed.  We opened all the wine, and we concocted entrees and pieces de resistance, and stirred up little savory chef de cuisines and organized a mass of grub such as has been seldom instigated out of canned and bottled goods.  The railroad gathered around it, and the wassail and diversions was intense.

After the feast me and Caligula, in the line of business, takes Major Tucker to one side and talks ransom.  The major pulls out an agglomeration of currency about the size of the price of a town lot in the suburbs of Rabbitville, Arizona, and makes this outcry.

“Gentlemen,” says he, “the stock of the Sunrise & Edenville railroad has depreciated some.  The best I could do with thirty thousand dollars’ worth of the bonds was to secure a loan of eighty-seven dollars and fifty cents.  On the farming lands of Colonel Rockingham, Judge Pendergast was able to obtain, on a ninth mortgage, the sum of fifty dollars.  You will find the amount, one hundred and thirty-seven fifty, correct.”

“A railroad president,” said I, looking this Tucker in the eye, “and the owner of a thousand acres of land; and yet—­”

“Gentlemen,” says Tucker, “The railroad is ten miles long.  There don’t any train run on it except when the crew goes out in the pines and gathers enough lightwood knots to get up steam.  A long time ago, when times was good, the net earnings used to run as high as eighteen dollars a week.  Colonel Rockingham’s land has been sold for taxes thirteen times.  There hasn’t been a peach crop in this part of Georgia for two years.  The wet spring killed the watermelons.  Nobody around here has money enough to buy fertilizer; and land is so poor the corn crop failed and there wasn’t enough grass to support the rabbits.  All the people have had to eat in this section for over a year is hog and hominy, and—­”