Another man with a sailor-like roll in his walk was leaning on an axe. Suddenly he cast his eyes up at the pilaster. Paula on the shadowy side of the window sat quite still, not daring to move, hoping for invisibility, although her heart beat so loud that she thought they might hear its pulsations even at the distance.
“Durned if I got much sense out of that fool builder’s talk to you, Jasper,” he said. “I think you paid out too much line,—never held him to the p’int. You let him talk sixteen ter the dozen ’bout things we warn’t consarned with, pediments, an’ plinths, an’ architraves, an’ entablatures, an’, shucks, I dunno now what half of ’em mean.”
“I had to do that to keep him from suspicionin’ what we were after,” Binnhart justified his policy. “All I wanted to know was just what a ‘pilaster’ might be.”
“An’ this half column ag’in the wall is the ‘pilaster’ the Crazy talked about?” And once more the shanty-boater cast up a speculative eye. “But I ain’t sensed yit what he meant by his mention of a capital.”
“Why, Jackson, capital of Miss’ippi, ye fool you, fines’ city in the Union,” exclaimed a younger replica of the old water-rat, coming up from the shrubbery with a lot of tools in a smith’s shoeing-box, from which, as he still held it, Binnhart began with a careful hand to select the implements that were needed for the work.
“How do you know the plunder is in the ‘pilaster’?” asked Connover, the dejected phase of the “after effects” clouding his optimism.
“Why, he talked about it in his sleep. He may be crazy when he is awake, but he talks as straight as a string in his sleep. Fust chance, as I gathered, that he has ever had to be sane enough to make a try for the swag,” explained Berridge. “But I dunno why you pick out this partic’lar pilaster,” and he, too, gazed up at its lofty height.
“By the way he looked at it when we was fetchin’ him in from the skiff, that’s why, you shrimp,” exclaimed the shanty-boater.
“I don’t call that a straight tip,” said Connover, discontentedly.
“Why, man, this Treherne was with Archie Ducie when they hid the plunder. This is the column he says in his sleep they put it in, an’, by God, I’ll bring the whole thing to the ground but what I s’arches it, from top to bottom. I’ll bust it wide open.”