The work of hiding them was sometimes performed by the planters themselves, if they happened to be at home, but it was generally intrusted to old and faithful servants in whom their owners had every confidence.

It not unfrequently happened that these old and faithful servants proved themselves utterly unworthy of the trust reposed in them.

Sometimes they told the raiding soldiers where the property was concealed, and at others they ran away without telling even their masters where the valuables were hidden.

General Gordon's old servant, Jordan, was one of this stamp.

He went off with the Union forces, who raided that part of Mississippi, and before he went he told a rebel soldier, Godfrey Evans, who happened to be at home on a furlough, and who was skulking in the woods to avoid capture, that he had just buried a barrel containing eighty thousand dollars in gold and silver in his master's potato-patch, and that none of the family knew where it was.
This Godfrey Evans had been well off in the world at one time.