“Don’t look like he amounted to much as a watcher,” said Binney. “I bet we could walk right past him.”
“Wait till he’s fast asleep and try,” Mark said, and kind of grinned.
We waited maybe fifteen minutes, and I can tell you it was beginning to get pretty chilly in there with all that ice and gold that had gone and turned back into damp sawdust. We were getting more game than we had figured on.
“Don’t see what the man was so—riled about,” Plunk grumbled. “We hadn’t done nothing to him.”
“Thought we come to coon somethin’, I guess,” I told him; and that seemed likely, but when we got all through with the man and the house we knew that wasn’t the reason at all.
“I’m a-goin’ to try,” says Binney, and he shoved his legs through the door and begins crawling down the ladder. He was about halfway down when the dog grunted and cocked his ears and sat up on his haunches and looked at Binney with his big eyes. Then he yawned, and we could see right down into his red throat, and every tooth in his head stared at us and we stared at them. Binney began to climb back again, and never said a word when he was through the door and sitting on the sawdust once more.
“Better watch-dog than you c-c-calc’lated,” says Mark, slyly-like, with his face as sober as Deacon Barns’s when he asks for offerings for the heathen.
Nobody thought of anything to say, and we kept getting chillier and chillier and uncomfortabler and uncomfortabler. Binney was uneasiest of all, because there was his father’s horse and rig standing by the side of the road, and no telling when somebody’d come along and borrow it, or something would come along and scare the creature till he ran off. It was a nice pickle to be in, any way you looked at it, and when the way you looked was toward that dog it was prettier than ever.
“We got to git out,” I said.
“S-s-sure,” Mark chattered. “Show us how and we’ll come right along.”