“Huh!... That means Wiggamore has hired ’em away. Hum!... Well, we can’t stop to fix that. See if you kin get more m-men, Silas. Do the best you kin. If you can’t get anybody, just plug along for a day or two. We got to find George Piggins before we do anything else.”
We said good night to Silas and left him feeling kind of blue, I guess. I was kind of blue myself, because it did look to me like we ought to stay and see about the mill instead of traipsing around after George. But there’s no use trying to run against Mark Tidd when he has his mind made up. He was going after George, and he would keep on till he found him if it took a year. It was a kind of a disease with him, like a boil, I guess. When you got a boil you hain’t comfortable till it busts. Well, Mark Tidd was never comfortable till he did what he set out to do.
When I went to bed I wasn’t expecting anything exciting to happen the next day. I wasn’t much expecting anything to happen, which shows that you never can tell. How was I to guess that the next little while was going to be about the most exciting and worrying time we ever had? But it was.
CHAPTER XVI
“What makes you think George Piggins is on Big Hole Island?” says I to Mark when we met early the next morning. I didn’t see why he should hit on that place for George to hide. The world looked like a pretty good-sized place to me, and I couldn’t see any reason for picking a couple of acres of marshy ground out of it. But he had some reason and I wanted to know what it was.
“Well,” says he, “you know George.”
“I do,” says I.
“What’s the m-m-main thing about George? If you was g-goin’ to p-pick out somethin’ that George was famous for, what would it be?”
“Laziness,” says I.
“Well?” says he, as if that settled it right there.