“After what ’peared to be a half hour, but I guess was ’bout five minutes, he looked up—an’ when we saw his face he had changed from a boy to a old man.
“We was standin’ quiet, not darin’ to ask what happened. Most of us thought his folks was dead. But then he threw that paper down on the ground and laughed—the kind o’ laugh as I could believe the devil would give ye if ye was goin’ down to hell. Then we knew ’twarnt no act o’ God had upset him, but some dam’ trick that could only be thought out by a human bein’.
“That was the last we saw o’ him. He went off into the woods. Joe picked up the paper and said he couldn’t find ennythin’ on thet page to disturb a body—mostly women’s fashions and one piece ’bout a gal elopin’ with a feller. I didn’ say nothin’, but I guessed it. That gal had sent him up to the mines to git a fortune and then gone and chucked him.
“We was all nervous at supper ’cause Bub didn’ come in, and ’long ’bout ten we set out to look fur him. The woods is dark at night, an’ we couldn’t find a trace till Joe, searchin’ up at Bub’s claim, come on that thar bowlder you seen to-day, and, curious to say, he stumbled over somethin’ same as you done, but ’twarn’t no pickax head—’twar a human bootleg. Puttin’ his lantern down low, he seen Bub’s foot a-stickin’ out from under that rock, and the whole plumb thing had let down and flattened the life out o’ him.
“’Twas a long time afore I went up to examine the place, and when I did thar was nothin’ to see but I figgered it out fur myself, and this is how it must ’a’ bin.
“Bub had most likely bin diggin’ under the rock and gitting out the pay dirt, and when he’d git so fur in he’d put in a plug to shore up the thing and keep it from fallin’. That day when he read that paper and he felt the whole world crumblin’ ’round his head, he jest made it literal by goin’ up to his claim, crawlin’ under the stone, and kickin’ out the plugs.”
There was a pause.
Peter rose; cutting a piece of the roasting brisket, he started for his bunk, but stopped before climbing in.
“That’s why I ast you if you turned over the stone—but I hoped you didn’t.”
Scott had been fifteen years in the woods and wanted to settle down, saying he would like to see some little Scotts running around. So when the summer camp broke up he looked about for a location. He found a log house that had been built by a man named Carrick, who was hated in the community, principally because he held mortgages on nearly all the farms for twenty miles around. Carrick did not have a right to this particular homestead, as he did not live on it, so Scott went in and jumped the property.