He had a smile of stern satisfaction on his face when he was lopping off the leaves and twigs of a specimen admirably adapted for vengeance. He was stealthy in returning, keeping behind the trees, and slipping softly from bole to bole. At last, as the winding road was once more in view, he crouched down behind the roots of the great fallen oak.
“I don’t want him ter git a glimge of me, an’ skeer him off afore I kin lay a-holt on him,” he said.
He intended to keep the neighboring bush under close watch, and through the interlacing roots he peered out furtively at it. His eyes distended and he hastily rose from his hiding-place.
The blackberry bush was swaying in the wind, clothed only in its own scant and rusty leaves. A wren perched on a spray, chirped cheerful matins.
CHAPTER VI.
His scheme was thwarted. The boy had come and gone in his absence, all unaware of his proximity and the impending punishment so narrowly escaped.
But when Andy Byers reached the tanyard and went to work, he said nothing to Birt. He did not even allude to the counterfeit apparition in the woods, although Mrs. Price’s probable recovery was more than once under discussion among the men who came and went, - indeed, she lived many years thereafter, to defend her lucky grandchildren against every device of discipline. Byers had given heed to more crafty counsels. On the whole he was now glad that he had not had the opportunity to make Birt and the hickory sprout acquainted with each other. This would be an acknowledgment that he had been terrified by the manufactured ghost, and he preferred foregoing open revenge to encountering the jocose tanner’s ridicule, and the gibes that would circulate at his expense throughout the country-side. But he cherished the grievance, and he resolved that Birt should rue it. He had expected that Birt would boast of having frightened him. He intended to admit that he had been a trifle startled, and in treating the matter thus lightly he hoped it would seem that the apparition was a failure.
However, day by day passed and nothing was said. The ghost vanished as mysteriously as it had come. Only Mrs. Dicey, taking her bonnet and apron and shawl from the chest, was amazed at the extraordinary manner in which they were folded and at their limp condition, and when she found a bunch of cockle-burs in the worsted fringes of the shawl she declared that witches must have had it, for she had not worn it since early in April when there were no cockle-burs. She forthwith nailed a horseshoe on the door to keep the witches out, and she never liked the shawl so well after she had projected a mental picture of a lady wearing it, riding on a broomstick, and sporting also a long peaked nose.
Birt hardly noticed the crusty and ungracious conduct of Andy Byers toward him. He worked on doggedly, scheming all the time to get off from the tanyard, and wondering again and again why Nate had gone, and where, and when he would return.
One day - a gray day it was and threatening rain - as he came suddenly out of the shed, he saw a boy at the bars. It was Nate Griggs! No; only for a moment he thought this was Nate. But this fellow’s eyes were not so close together; his hair was less sandy; there were no facial indications of extreme slyness. It was only Nathan’s humble likeness, his younger brother, Timothy.