“All right; all right,” he interrupted. “I don’t want to listen. Much obleeged fer your trouble,” he added to Mr. Chester. “I reckon I’ll be goin’ along home.”
“Do you think you’re strong enough?” asked Mr. Chester. “If you’re not, I can have my carriage—”
“No, no,” broke in the other, impatiently. “I’m all right, I tell ye,” and he slouched off across the garden.
We stood and watched him as he walked away, until the dusk hid him; then Mr. Chester turned to the boys with a stern light in his eyes.
“Now,” he said, “perhaps you two young gentlemen will be good enough to explain what you hoped to accomplish by this trick.”
“We were going to make him confess, sir,” answered Dick, in a subdued voice.
“Confess? Confess what?”
“Where the treasure is, sir. You know you said you thought he knew where it was, and then you told about coming on him that time dressed as a ghost; and we thought maybe if we dropped on him sudden in the dark in the same place, he might think we were for-sure ghosts—”
“One of us was going to pretend to be Mrs. Nelson,” supplemented Tom. “We thought we might frighten it out of him.”
“But, of course,” said Dick, miserably, “we hadn’t any idea it would turn out like that.”