Chapter XXIV.
The Sage Unearths a Treasure.
The effect on the boys was startling.
In the confusion of the moment, George probably took it for one of his “sprites;” and he dropped Steve’s bow, stepped on it, and broke it.
Marmaduke felt that there must be something ghostly and necromantic in such a cry, coming, in the hush of evening, from a shapely evergreen that rose beside a rolling, moonlit river.
Jim was seized with a painful attack of his chills, and ran bellowing homewards.
Stephen, impetuous and heedless as ever, picked up a stone and threw it furiously into the tree.
The reader of fiction does not need to be told that “all this happened in an instant.”
Where the stone struck Mr. Herriman is not known; but with a crash he fell headlong to the ground, rolled over twice,—roaring, meantime, with rage, pain, and terror,—and before the thunderstruck boys could recover from their stupefaction, he had disappeared in the water.
Then Stephen, with great presence of mind, exclaimed: “Boys, I told you that tree was inhabited!”