Mary Potter looked up, as if expecting the question to be answered, and Gilbert said:—
“He took the lead, and kept it.”
“O cracky!” exclaimed the delighted Sam.
“Then you think it's a good bargain, Gilbert. Was it a long chase? Was he well tried?”
“All right, mother. I could sell him for twenty dollars advance—even to Joel Ferris,” he answered.
He then gave a sketch of the afternoon's adventures, to which his mother listened with a keen, steady interest. She compelled him to describe the stranger, Fortune, as minutely as possible, as if desirous of finding some form or event in her own memory to which he could be attached; but without result.
After supper Sam squatted upon a stool in the corner of the fireplace, and resumed his reading of “The Old English Baron,” by the light of the burning back-log, pronouncing every word to himself in something between a whisper and a whistle. Gilbert took an account-book, a leaden inkstand, and a stumpy pen from a drawer under the window, and calculated silently and somewhat laboriously. His mother produced a clocked stocking of blue wool, and proceeded to turn the heel.
In half an hour's time, however, Sam's whispering ceased; his head nodded violently, and the book fell upon the hearth.
“I guess I'll go to bed,” he said; and having thus conscientiously announced his intention, he trotted up the steep back-stairs on his hands and feet. In two minutes more, a creaking overhead announced that the act was accomplished.
Gilbert filliped the ink out of his pen into the fire, laid it in his book, and turned away from the table.