“Yes, and he frightened me nearly to death for a minute,” I said.
“It couldn’t have happened better,” said Dick. “He talked quite a while, and we had time to get all our trappings ready; and just as he turned to go, we threw Tom’s big seine over him and dropped off the wall. Before we had time to do any more, he had fainted—we thought he was dead.”
“And suppose he had been dead,” said Mr. Chester, “as he might easily have been, since his heart is probably diseased, do you know that at this moment both of you would be guilty of manslaughter? You hadn’t thought about that, of course?”
“No, sir,” answered both boys, together.
“Do you think your mother, Dick, would have been willing to pay such a price as that for this place?”
“No, sir,” burst out Dick; “nor I wouldn’t either. I—I don’t like the place any more—mother won’t either, when I tell her.”
“Oh, Dick!” I cried reproachfully.
Mr. Chester said nothing for a moment, but stood in deep thought.
“I will tell your mother myself,” he said, finally. “We mustn’t have her prejudiced against the place. But I hope this afternoon’s experience will teach both of you a lesson—I hope that neither of you will ever again try to startle anyone as you tried to startle Mr. Tunstall this afternoon. There is no kind of joke so dangerous. And, by the way, Cecil,” he went on, turning to me, “what was it you and Mr. Tunstall were talking about so long?”
“Why, I don’t just remember, sir,” I answered. “He told me about getting the message, and I told him I was sure it wasn’t from mother; and then we talked about the treasure, and he said to go ahead and hunt for it, that it wasn’t any of his business until the seventeenth of May, and that he was going to play fair.”