“It looks exactly like the mud pies my mother’s boy used to make,” said Ben with an anxious air.
“There’s a little color there, or I’m mistaken,” Mundon wisely remarked, as he scanned the sediment.
“Yellow’s the color I’m looking for.”
“Well, there’s some yellow in that. Hold it up to the light. Now, it does shine! I’ll be hanged if it don’t!”
“Goodness knows, I want to see it as much as any one!” said Ben; “but I’m afraid this is too much like imagination. It reminds me of the time people thought they saw flying-machines in the sky.”
Mundon shook his head. “I ain’t that kind,” he remarked, as he returned to his work of constructing the “jigger.” “After all,” he continued, “you can’t tell much about it till you make the ’speriment in the proper way. This machine’ll settle it one way or the other.”
He worked rapidly and skillfully, and by the following night the “jigger” was completed.
“My!” he exclaimed as he drove the last nails. “It was luck, blind luck, my meetin’ that feller and his tellin’ me jest exactly what I wanted to know!”