“Into the smoke-house you go,” says he. “I’ll show ye. Won’t I show ye? Well, I should guess!”
And he did that very thing. He dragged us along and kicked open the door to his smoke-house and pushed us in. Then he shut the door and we could hear him barring it.
“There,” says he. “Try that a spell. Apples, eh? Oh, he!” Then we heard him walking off.
I didn’t feel much like talking, and neither did Mark, but I couldn’t help saying:
“Jehoshaphat’ll have to be delayed consid’able if he don’t git to Sunfield ahead of us.”
Mark nodded doleful-like. “Seems like luck was d-dead against us,” says he. “But,” he says, “Skip hain’t got there yet—and it’s early in the mornin’.”
CHAPTER XVII
We started right in to nose around, but that smoke-house was pretty nearly air-tight. Dark! Mister, but it was dark! And it was full of cobwebs and smell and dirt. There was just as much chance of getting out of there till Mr. Hamilcar Janes let us out as there would be of sawing a bar of steel with a chunk of cheese. There wasn’t a thing to do but sit down and be as patient as we could—which wasn’t very patient, when you come to consider all the circumstances. One thing that made me mad was that I hadn’t eaten some of Hamilcar’s apples. We couldn’t have been shut up a bit more if we’d eaten a bushel.
Time passes pretty slow when you’re sitting in the dark. I don’t know how long it was before we heard a sound outside, but it seemed like it must be the next week Tuesday. Then we heard somebody holler from the road:
“Hey, there, are you Mr. Janes?”