“Ah, my young friend,” - he motioned to Birt to come nearer, - ”I want to speak to you.”
Birt stared. One might have inferred, from the tone, that the gentleman had expected to meet him here, whereas Birt had just had the best evidence of his senses that the encounter was a great surprise.
The boy observed his interlocutor more carefully than he had yet been able to do. He remembered all at once Rufe’s queer story of meeting, down the ravine, an eccentric old man whom he was disposed to identify as Satan. As the stranger stood there in the deer-path, he looked precisely as Rufe had described him, even to the baffling glitter of his spectacles, his gray whiskers, and the curiously shaped hammer in his hand.
Birt, although bewildered and still tremulous from the shock to his nerves, was not so superstitious as Rufe, and he shouldered his gun, and, pushing out from the tangled underbrush, joined the old man in the path.
“I want,” said the gentleman, “to hire a boy for a few days - weeks, perhaps.”
He smiled with two whole rows of teeth that never grew where they stood. Birt wished he could see the expression of the stranger’s eyes, indistinguishable behind the spectacles that glimmered in the light.
“What do you say to fifty cents a day?” he continued briskly.
Birt’s heart sank suddenly. He had heard that Satan traded in souls by working on the avarice of the victim. The price suggested seemed a great deal to Birt, for in this region there is little cash in circulation, barter serving all the ordinary purposes of commerce.
As he hesitated, the old man eyed him quizzically. “Afraid of work, eh?”
“Naw, sir!” said Birt, sturdily.